


Spent Gladiator

by Cas_tellations



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Beaches, Death, Falling In Love, Flashbacks, Getting Together, Gore, Graphic Description of Corpses, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Ocean, Panic Attacks, Shiro (Voltron) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Violence, War, accompanied playlist available
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-01-20 20:29:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21287714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cas_tellations/pseuds/Cas_tellations
Summary: This is a story of redemption.//☆//“Do you… Do you want to come home, Takashi?”Home… home is back on the coast, not in some wasteland a million miles away. Maybe he’s not ready to go back yet; he can’t seem to get the blood out from beneath his nails, and sometimes he looks for his gun, tries to grab at his daggers as he jerks awake with a dying scream on his lips.Home is something different. Home is for people who are good.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 76





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> I hope that everybody likes reading this, I poured my entire heart and soul into it.
> 
> [Playlist may be found here.](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj6d8B0C3s2IzYFgYXmiXaNHnkvXlNLWq)

**SPENT GLADIATOR**

** _The first chapter of a war story._ **

_ “Take a picture or two; Just to remember the view; _

_ Leave a mark on the door; As an empty warning sign; _

_ From one who's gone before; _

_ But isn't here any more” _

-_ Done Bleeding by **The Mountain Goats** _

** _I._ **

They say that he will make a full recovery, but the room is stuffy and suffocating and there’s a constant stream of nurses flitting in and out, connecting him to machines until he is a jumble of wires, all messed up and tangled. 

He lays through it, barely flinching when a young nurse with shaking hands can’t find a vein and presses the needle into his skin over and over again, puncturing it with holes, full of holes. Gaping, red, bleeding holes. Rough, cut, burned, stabbed, raked, blown-up holes. Red, like the colour that he’s stained in, from head to toe.

Red, like Clint’s blood, soaking through his uniform and through Shiro’s and through his skin, into his heart. Red, like the tiny American flag on the corner of his uniform that was burned out and sewn over with a dark patch and a cross of bones on the mission where- 

“I’m just going to check your blood pressure,” a voice says, quiet, fading through the static. 

Shiro might say something. He thinks that he tries to say something. There’s no way to tell for sure, now. 

Because now, everything is red, dripping from the ceiling, seeping through his bandages, splashing under the nurse's feet, coating the walls. Oh, oh, God. 

They tell him that he will be okay. They keep telling him, over and over again, like some sort of fucked-up mantra, some prayer, that he will be okay. That he _is okay_, now. They say that they saved him; they say that he is back home. They say that the good guys won and that they won because of him. They say that the bad guys got what they deserved and that they owe Shiro a debt that they will never be able to repay. They say that he will be okay. 

They do not say that Clint will be okay because Clint is dead. They do not say that Jason will be okay because Jason is dead. They do not say that Bruce, or Jack, or Frank, or Don will be okay. They do not mention anybody else, only that _Shiro will_ be okay, now, or one day. 

He’s not sure how long it’s been since they’ve been telling this to him. How long has he been laying here, anyway? It could be a week, a month, a year - he wouldn’t know any different.

“Thank you for your sacrifice,” one of the doctors says, one day. Shiro feels sick to his stomach and thinks about spitting in the doctor’s face, yelling at how his sacrifice was nothing. Absolutely _nothing compared_ to the rest of the men in his troop, who lost far more than just an arm. That doctor doesn’t stick around for long, so Shiro doesn’t have a chance to see if he can actually stand up and take him down. It isn’t until days later when his mind clears from the worst of the anger does he realise how much of a colossal mistake that would have been, had he been strong enough to execute it properly.

“How much are you hurting right now?” 

“Would you like more pain medication?” 

“Can you hear me, Shirogane?” 

“Can you hear this, Shirogane?” 

They pump him full of pain medication until he can’t feel much of anything at all and then they set to finding some sort of hearing aid for him, because apparently the bomb took that with it, too. He knows that the bags under his eyes are growing deeper and heavier even without looking at a mirror, because he can feel his eyes stinging and it’s not just from the tears.

He sleeps, sometimes. 

When he does though, everything is plagued, all ugly and gross. He’s back across the sea, sifting through bodies, or he’s drowning in blood, or somebody’s chasing him and his arm is gone and he’s - 

Falling;

Falling;

Falling.

His grandparents come and they won't leave his bedside. One of them is always there, at every moment. Sometimes, Shiro sees them caked in blood too and he cries. Sometimes, his mind toys with the idea of them being in the war with him and dying in his arms and Shiro always jolts awake with a suffocated scream that dies on his lips, his pants coming short but silent because the enemy cannot become aware of his presence - their camp is so close and they have no ammunition left, no more cards to play. They must stay dead silent at all times, no matter what. Even just a gasp could give them away and the battle would be lost; the war would follow soon thereafter, surely. 

A therapist comes, one day, and Shiro’s grandparents clear out of the room. Shiro tries to talk, he does. Nothing comes out though, no words getting past his lips except a dry sob at the therapist’s sympathetic and pitying expression. Regular appointments are made, once every few days, and he needs to work his mind so hard to be able to form words that resemble any form of coherence. 

“Takashi,” his grandmother says one day, holding his bandaged hand in her own weathered one. “You’re a million miles away right now, aren’t you?” 

Shiro can hear her, through the haze, through the battle that he’s fighting. 

He nods against his pillow, or tries to. 

He’s not sure if he’s alive right now. He’s not sure if he’s dead, or somewhere in limbo, between everything and nothing, balancing on a rope that’s snapping from both ends. 

“He’s going to be okay,” Shiro’s grandfather says, and there’s endless amounts of pain, his voice thick with it. 

“He is strong,” his grandmother says, and then, “but he has been through so much. He is tired.” 

“You would be, too,” he says. “If you had to go through what Takashi did.” 

“Yes,” she says. “Nobody should have to go through that.” 

Nobody should, but Shiro did. Shiro is. 

He had been fresh out of high school, young and bright - report cards always full of A’s and mouth always curved up in a smile, waving at all the neighbors when he walked the paper route. He was a constant cheery presence - even from a young age, following the loss of both his parents in a vicious hurricane. Growing up in his grandparents’ cottage on the ocean side, he had gathered shells and sea glass, playing in the sand and rolling up his pants so that he could wade into the ocean to fish out bright purple sea stars from the sides of barnacle-covered rocks. 

He decided to join the army, to serve his country, before heading off to university, as his father had done. He had grown up hearing tales of his father and his bravery, his daring, and his kindness. Every night before bed, his grandmother would take out photo albums and tell Shiro stories of her son from whichever photo he picked. 

Shiro’s favorite was the story of the kitten, which his grandmother tells as follows:

_ “It was a dark and stormy night. Oh, probably sometime in March. Your father was nine years old and he was home sick from school, as a horrible cold had been going around. So I told him that he had to stay inside and I gave him all sorts of treats to try and get him to stay - his favorite T.V shows, ice cream, and I even baked a fresh batch of my famous cookies. Try as I might, I couldn’t get him to stay indoors because-” _

_ “-Because he was so in love with the outdoors!” Shiro always chimed in. “Just like me!” _

_ “Just like you, yes. So when I was busy tidying up the living room, your father snuck out through the window!” _

_ Shiro always gasped dramatically at this part. “Through this window?” He points at the one above his desk. _

_ “Yes, through that very window, because your room used to be his room. He snuck out without my knowing and went down to the beach, which is dangerous because the ocean is many things, but it is not forgiving, and would snatch up a little nine-year-old like your father in a heartbeat and there would be nobody there to save him.” _

_ “But the ocean didn’t snatch him up!” _

_ “The ocean didn’t snatch him up, that’s right. So, he was walking along the shore, with a cold, and no coat, and he came across a little cardboard box. He didn’t think much of it, at first, because some trash always washes up on the beach and sometimes people leave their garbage behind. We - your grandfather and I - raised that boy right, though, so he went to pick up the garbage, because it’s not very kind to the ocean to leave it lying around on the shore.” _

_ “And he found a kitten!” Shiro screeches. _

_ “And he found a kitten.” She nodded wisely. “A tiny, scrappy little kitten, all soaked through from the rain, barely breathing. It was in the box, all alone and cold. Your father was so caring that he picked up the scrappy little thing, tucked it into his shirt and ran the whole way home! Now, he had made it quite far from home, so he had to run for nearly fifteen minutes straight, all the way from the Kogane’s house back here.” _

_ “That’s where Keith lives,” Shiro says wisely. _

_ “Well, that’s where Keith’s grandparents and his mother lived,” she says. “So, he ran all the way from there to here and burst through the front door, nearly scaring me half to death because I had thought him to be asleep in his room. I do believe I shrieked a little bit.” _

_ Shiro laughs at that part, because his grandmother is the bravest person he knows and it’s kind of crazy to think of her being scared at any point in time. _

_ “Right away he made me start up the fire and he brought all of his blankets out into the living room in a pile in front of the woodstove, and he didn’t climb under all those blankets - he just gently put the kitten down, who was meowing up a storm by this point, and he went outside to fetch kindling without my asking!” _

_ Shiro watches her, with wide eyes. _

_ “You see,” she says, and pulls Shiro close to her side. “Your father was the gentlest person in the world. He put everybody before himself, even that tiny little kitten. Your father was so kind, and caring.” _

_ “I want to be just like him,” Shiro often said at that point. _

_ “Oh, Takashi,” his grandmother would say, and kiss the top of his head. “That is such a beautiful thing to say.” _

Shiro had always looked up to his father and when he got the chance to sign up for the army, he jumped at it, because it’s what his father had done. He wanted to keep his memory alive, to hold some piece of his father’s mind within his hands, to understand what he had felt and what he had gone through at some point in his life. 

Basic training had been trying and hard, but he worked until he no longer could and flew through with shining colours, keeping up a smiling face the whole way through, lending anybody support if they needed it and forging close bonds. 

He was chosen along with nineteen of the other best soldiers to go on a tour overseas. Shiro should have known that something was off but some part of him was so excited to leave, to follow in his father’s footsteps, that he hadn’t paid as much mind to the heavily redacted files that he was given and hadn’t bothered to think about how it was strange that he couldn’t tell anybody that he was leaving. It was thrilling to have such an intense purpose. 

When they got to the other side of the ocean, to where people spoke different tongues and the air tasted different when Shiro breathed it in, he stood at constant attention, playing the best soldier act that he could. In the evenings and at eating times, he grew better acquainted with the rest of the people in his troop, and he found that they were all quite similar: young, strong, brave. 

All of them would listen to their commander’s orders without question. Maybe that's where it all went wrong. 

Shiro’s troop was one not accounted for in the regular numbers and their uniforms were stripped of any identifying marks - American flags burned out or cut out with sharp swiss knives. Their troop stood separate from the ones engaging in face-to-face combat and, for the most part, they stayed clear of these zones as they gathered intelligence and took out specific hits. 

They were on a hill rise one day, standing beneath a sprinkling of trees, when they heard the sound of heavy gunfire. As one, they dropped to the ground, and Diemer got out the binoculars and they looked down the hill, to the bottom where-

-where the ground ran red. 

A troop was being slaughtered. An American troop was being slaughtered, killed as they tried to surge forwards. Killed as they served their country, rivers of blood running onto American flags.

This was the first time that Shiro felt hopeless. 

Lance choked, gasped, and vomited. Jason gripped his gun tighter, eyes narrowing and fury filling his face. Diemer looked taken aback - surprised, eyes wide like he couldn’t quite comprehend anything yet. 

And Shiro… Shiro just felt lost. 

He got a hold of his men, pulled them down from the precipice, and they sifted through the bodies later - after they’d taken out the shooters and nobody was left alive. 

The first time Shiro took a life, he did so because he had to. It was a faceless, humanless shape or someone, and Shiro didn’t even think before he was taking him out. It didn’t hit him until later when he was knee-deep in a stream, trying to wash the blood out of his clothes and off of his skin. It got him then, hitting hard and digging its talons in. 

He knew it was part of the war. It was a trade-off. It was an impossible thing to avoid. Still, Shiro could not sleep that night and the next day his troop went further into occupied territory and he learned to become numb to it, learned to dehumanize and compartmentalize. 

The troop was unnamed and set free with the instruction to tear down the enemy through interrogations and high-stakes hits. They got some trails on their backs, sometimes. They were dealt with quickly and quietly, bodies thrown into a river or a ditch or just left to rot - left to be picked apart by crows. 

“Shirogane, can you hear me?” 

He thinks he nods. Maybe he lifts his hand. It’s hard to tell. 

The room is filled with trees, it’s filled with bodies. 

“_ You shouldn’t have lived. _”

“Sedate him.” 

And everything dims, goes dark, but the voices remain. They are screams, strangled and cut off by rope, chain, blades and an ax - 

“_ No no no no no no no - no! That’s my daughter, no! No! Not her, not her, please! Please, God, take me! _” 

He remembers the face of the little girl. It swims to the top of his vision and stays there steadfast. Her face is red and her eyes are streaming. Her mouth bleeds and her eye is swollen shut, her hair matted. They had been using her for- for… for the drugs, yes. That was it, using her to smuggle them. What happened to the little girl? What happened to her mother? 

The gaps in his memory eat him alive, tearing his flesh from bone like an animal. 

“Takashi, darling.” There is a soft hand clutching on to his. He can feel it in his chest and in his nerves.

He opens his eyes and the blood has been cleaned away from the room. 

“There you are. You’ve been so far away.” 

He closes his eyes again, lids too heavy. His grandmother’s touch is warm and gentle. It is kind, a polar opposite from everything he has ever felt in so, so unbelievably long. 

The last time he held a hand- 

-He’s in a minefield, ears ringing, boots caked in mud made from dust and blood. He sees Jason on the ground. He’s moving, rolling, trying to crawl away somewhere to die like a wounded dog. Shiro screams, “Jay!” But he can barely even hear himself. He goes to grab Jay’s hand, goes to pull him up, get him on his feet so that they can move faster, but his arm- 

“Takashi, Takashi, it’s okay. You’re safe.” 

-His arm comes away from his body, and Jason doesn’t even seem to recognize this - his eyes are so far away, seeing something that isn’t there. Shiro holds the arm, falls to his knees, grabs Jay’s shoulder. He just needs to get up, then they can get away. They can set up camp, curl up in the ground and sleep beneath the stars. All Jason needs to do is get up. Shiro tugs him, pulls at him, won’t let go of his hand, even though it is strangely cold. 

Why is it so cold? Jay probably lost circulation to it; his uniform is all twisted up. He tells Jay to get up, tries to make him. Jason is so heavy though. He can’t make him get up. Hadn't he been able to lift Jay above his head the other day? Why can’t he lift Jason up, now?

“Darling, it’s okay, it’s okay, you’re here, you’re fine.” 

-The mud is warm when he falls into it, when he crawls away from Jason and goes to Don, because Jay is sleeping. Don is sleeping, too. Shiro tries waking him up, but he doesn’t. Why is everything so… so red? 

He looks at his hands and they are stained in crimson. He touches his face, his cheek, and it comes away shiny and wet. He frowns, blinks. 

He tries to move his other arm- 

-and suddenly an elderly woman is there, looking terrified. Shiro’s body rocks with the breaths that he takes and he shoots up. The enemy has him - they haven’t tied him down though, thank the Gods. He lunges forward in one movement, grabs the enemy by the throat and is out of the bed in one motion, shoving her up against the wall and ripping wires from his body. Have they been experimenting on him? 

“Ta-taka...shi…” the enemy gasps, feeble. Her hands scratch at his skin but she is not thrashing, not fighting back as everyone else does. 

He needs to get out. Right now. He needs to find his troops. 

“Shi…Shiro,” the enemy says, and his throat closes up - maybe they have been experimenting on him, and have injected him with something to weaken him. 

“My name,” he snarls, “is Kuron.” 

There is a crash and a shout from behind him and he lets the old enemy fall to the ground, hearing her choke for a breath as his eyes dart around the room, cataloging the newcomers. 

“Sedation,” one of them mutters to another. “Now!” 

He lunges. 

It is dark, a million miles away. 

Jason is laughing and Clint puffs from a cigarette. “We don’t even exist,” Don is saying. “This entire thing is so under wraps that if we went missing not even our families would know about it.” 

Jason rolls his eyes. “Don’t sound so happy about it.” 

“We’re outlaws!” Diemer cries. “Renegades of the night! Shadow fighters!” 

“_We’re soldiers_,” Shiro says with a grin. “ _ You’re _ overdramatic.” 

“No, really. Everything’s so redacted our names aren’t even used,” Clint says. “We literally don’t exist out here. For all intents and purposes, we’re still somewhere in the land of the free.” 

The nicknames are thrown around like jokes but they end up sticking in a way that none of them intended. Distance from their former lives grows naturally - they don’t have any pictures to look back on and it feels wrong to conjure up memories when their hands are covered in death and their brains lie tortured. 

They call Shiro _Kuron,_ and Shiro likes it - relishes in it: the power the name gives him, the way that it lies untouched from everything that he once held close. 

Jason sinks into _Jay and_ Clint becomes the _Hawk._ Lance takes up _Blue,_ and Diemer gets called _Dice._ Don goes by _Hellhound, _and the names are sewn into the inside of the jackets. Their dog tags have long since been abandoned, lost through time. The missions that they go on are too high-stakes, there’s too much for them to lose, if their identification falls into the wrong hands. 

They are untouchable, the way they dance together - the way they kill together. 

Shiro gasps, coughs, and claws his way out of the darkness. 

“Shiro?” his grandmother asks, and he blinks at her, eyes wide. 

“I…” It’s nothing more than a whisper. His throat aches something awful and his head pounds. 

“You’re okay,” she says. “You’re safe, okay? Back in America and everything. You’re in the hospital now, to help you get better.” 

Shiro nods, or doesn’t. The room feels like it’s spinning; he can barely tell up from down. 

“You’re here now, aren’t you?” she murmurs and bends down to kiss his forehead. 

Here now, like he hadn’t been before. It’s so hard to think with such a pounding headache. 

He fades in and out of sleep, gaining a few hours of coherence each day. Some are worse, and some days he cannot remember anything at all, but the doctors and his grandparents say that he’s making progress. They keep saying that, like it’s a reassuring fact. 

It could be reassuring, if Shiro wasn’t the only one left. 

Maybe, if he was able to save the others, then- 

He doesn’t know what would happen then. Maybe his nightmares wouldn't be so bad, and then he feels sick for being so selfish. 

He mourns their deaths in every waking moment and every unconscious moment, too. 

“You’re back in America,” a doctor greets him with - he’s a new one, and has some sort of spark in his eye that none of the others did, after trying to work with Shiro for some time. 

Shiro raises a hand covered in wires, makes a fist, and bobs it up and down. _ Yes. _He’s not, though. He’s back on the other side of the ocean, sifting through bodies, watching the rivers of blood flow, and walking on all the same. 

“I see that you’re feeling better physically, yes?” 

_ Yes. _Shiro bobs his hand again. Comply, his mind says. It’s easier than resisting. 

“We hope to be sending you back home soon. I know it’s been a rough couple of months all cooped up here.”

Months, huh. Days turned into weeks and piled up into months. He’s not sure what he was expecting. But then again, he’s not sure of much, these days. 

“How are your nightmares?” the doctor says. 

If Shiro could grab a breath, if he could speak through the scratchy pain in his throat, he might yell. How dare this man come in here and call them - call them nightmares, when they are Shiro’s legacy. They’re the last moments of the best men in the world and they’re _gone _now, and Shiro is the only one left who could even come close to holding their memories near, the only one even remotely qualified to keep their memories alive. 

On the other side of the water, far deep inland, barricades are stripped away. There is no need for keeping anything private - no concept of secrecy between those on the Kerberos mission. Shiro knows everything about them, just as they had known everything about him_. _ It went deeper than the surface; he knew their souls. He knows their souls, sees them every single goddamn time that he closes his eyes or doesn’t focus on the material world. 

“Shirogane?” the man is saying, but it’s caught in the static. “Can you focus on my voice?” 

Shiro tries to, pulling himself through the riptide, breathing or hyperventilating or suffocating. 

No, no, no, no- no, no, no. No no no no no-

-He’s in the forest, sitting in a grove of trees. He’s stripped down to his tank top, back against a tree. Methodically, he takes apart his guns, one by one. He cleans each piece and assembles them back up like it’s something that he has been born to do. He unsheathes his knives and rubs the dried blood off of them before tucking them away again. An owl hoots and he hones onto the next mission as he slinks back into camp, sitting down beside Blue, who greets him with a quiet, “Kuron.”

His grandfather is before him, sitting beside the bed, a paperback flipped open. He’s not looking at the creased and old pages, though. He’s looking right at Shiro, like he’s the only thing in the room. “Good morning,” he says. “Your grandmother would be here but she needed a break.” 

_ I’m sorry, _Shiro signs. 

“Don’t be.” His grandfather sighs. “We are here for you in every single way that we can be, if you’ll let us. It’s just difficult, sometimes, to see someone you love so much in so much pain.” 

Shiro nods and sits up straighter. His grandfather leans forwards to push the pillows up so that they better support Shiro’s back. His muscles have wasted away after so much time without use, sitting in bed all day. He’s gotten up a few times, for shift walks down the hall, but he’s unsteady on his feet and he never realized how much he used his arm to walk.

“We’re trying to find a way to move you home, soon,” his grandfather continues. “The doctors agree. They say that recovery will be easier somewhere more… homey. It’ll be nice to smell the ocean again instead of all the chemical stuff, eh?” 

The last time Shiro had smelled the ocean’s salty scent on the air, it had been when he was shipping out. The first base he was at before he got pulled and put on the Kerberos mission was by the sea and Shiro had always loved the way it made him feel at ease, like he was back home. 

Home, with salt on the air and the methodical, lulling sound of crashing waves day in and day out. 

“Do you… Do you want to come home, Takashi?” 

Shiro swallows, but makes a fist and bobs it. _ Yes. _

Home… home is back on the coast, not in some wasteland a million miles away. Maybe he’s not ready to go back yet; he can’t seem to get the blood out from beneath his nails, and sometimes he looks for his gun, tries to grab at his daggers as he jerks awake with a dying scream on his lips. Home is something different. Home is for people who are good.


	2. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It takes too long to come back to himself. He sits there until the sun is fully up, fighting with his mind to try and make sense of what’s real and what’s not. He has a hand in his hair, another around his neck to feel the thud of a pulse that’s beating far too quickly. 

He goes home the following week, and on the drive they have to stop at three different hotels to stay the night before heading on. They speed down the highway day in and day out and Shiro lays in the backseat. He sits up sometimes, too, resting his forehead against the cool glass of the window. 

He opens the window during the sunset, or when it gets too stuffy in the truck, and sticks his arm out, feeling the wind pull him back, like it's trying to get him to stay where he is instead of move. They listen to some audiobooks - Little House on the Prairie, which Shiro loved growing up, and Robert Munch to fuel the nostalgia. James and the Giant Peach and even Ramona. It’s lighthearted, it’s free. 

He plugs in his old iPod touch and plays The Mountain Goats and Pink Floyd, and some Bowie and Bryan Adams. It makes him feel like a little kid again, safe in his grandparents’ pickup truck. They stop at a fruit stand and get cherries, blueberries, apricots, and raspberries, which Shiro munches on, and his grandfather takes handfuls of sporadically. It’s fresh, the flavor bursting on his tongue. There’s an ice cream stand further down the road and when the wind blows a metal container holding the spoons to the floor in a massive screeching clang, Shiro ducks down to the ground behind a picnic bench, flipping it onto its side and dragging his grandparents behind him, and is halfway to reaching for his gun when his grandfather's palm lands heavy on his own and Shiro snaps out of it. 

“Shit,” he says, standing and taking several steps backward, heart pounding. He grabs his head, pulls at his hair, like he can get his mind out of his brain. “Shit, shit, shit. I’m sorry. Sorry.” 

“It’s okay, Takashi,” his grandmother says, and his grandfather flips the table back up onto all four legs. Everybody’s eyes are on them and Shiro’s hands shake uncontrollably. He feels naked, unprotected out in this field. There’s nowhere to hide and he doesn’t have any weapons on him - anybody could hurt them right now, they could all be killed. Shiro sees the children, playing, running- licking their ice cream cones and pulling on their parents’ hands, their little eyes bored of watching Shiro’s show. 

He has to get them to safety, the enemy would grab them all and-

“You here with us still, Shiro?” 

He covers his mouth with one hand, feels like he’s about to throw up and signs,  _ yes _ . 

“Let’s get outta here, eh?” his grandfather says with a little smile, and holds out a strawberry cone. “I gotcha ice cream right here.” 

Shiro takes it because it’s being handed to him and numbly goes back to the truck, sits in the backseat. His grandmother climbs into the passenger seat and his grandfather starts up the truck and they pull slowly out of the parking lot. 

Several minutes later, his grandmother hands him a napkin and says, “You’re dripping ice cream everywhere, darling. Eat it, alright? Or I can.” She smiles at him, but it’s a pitying look. 

Shiro looks down at his hand. It’s covered in sticky pink melt. He takes the napkin and wipes it up, and then takes a lick of his ice cream. It’s tasteless, like dust. It scrapes down his throat, like sandpaper. 

Somebody puts on music - more Bowie. 

After Shiro finishes his ice cream, he pushes the fruit onto the floor and unbuckles his seatbelt, stretching across the seats and laying down with his head pillowed on the crook of his elbow. His head aches and his eyes sting. Someone turns down the music and opens the windows and Shiro is pulled down into sleep with the sound of time rushing by outside. 

He has never woken up screaming. 

In the war, if you screamed, the enemy could hear you, and if they could hear you, then they could find you. Shiro has long since trained himself to stay completely silent at all points in time, even being thrown into the waking world from a vicious nightmare full of monsters wearing his face and calling him “Kuron”. 

He doesn’t wake up screaming. He wakes up with knives in his hands and fear in his heart that is so easily channeled into anger. There is no room for fear, in the war. It gets pulled out of you early on, ground up and left in the dust, frayed and damaged. 

The fear comes back later, slipping into nightmares and sinking into his bloodstream. It’s here, now, more potent than it ever was during the fighting. It’s stronger now. It’s harder to fight now. 

He wakes up and he reaches under himself to grab at a dagger, but there isn’t one. Then he hears the music and feels the air whipping by.  _ In the truck,  _ his mind says, and then,  _ away from the killing.  _

“Have a good rest?” his grandmother asks when he sits up. The truck jerks under him and his grandfather swears: something about freaking quails and their inability to fly out of the face of danger. 

“S’all right,” Shiro murmurs, and sticks his arm out of the window. 

“We should make it back home within the hour,” she says. “Can you smell the ocean, Takashi?” 

Shiro breathes deeply and catches a hint of salt on the air. “Little bit.” 

“We’re still a ways out. It’ll get stronger soon,” she says. “You remember this road?” 

Farmland surrounds them, between tall trees. “Summer camp ‘round here?” Shiro asks, looking at the brown horses in one of the fields, munching on long grass. 

“Yes,” she says, and looks pleased. “We passed it while you were sleeping. Wasn’t that camp fun?” 

Shiro nods. It had been a long time ago, though. Some of the memories are fuzzy around the edges. 

The streets become familiar and then they turn past his old elementary school. They stop for groceries at the corner store and Shiro stays in the truck, looking out the window at how the world has kept turning while he was overseas. Someone painted the store - it’s green now, instead of a chipped and faded blue. Where a little white house used to sit, there’s a communal garden. The streets are blooming with a different kind of flower and the roads have had all their potholes filled in, at last. 

The nostalgia really hits when they’re driving down the cherry-tree lined lane towards the cottage.

“Home again, home again, jiggity jig!” 

The cottage looks weathered. It always has, situated so close to the ocean’s push and pull, but now it looks rougher than ever. Hasn't someone been planning on re-painting it? 

His bedroom is as he had left it. The bed has been made and his books tidied up, but other than those minor changes it’s like walking right back into his old life, before everything started crumbling apart. He closes the door behind him and would have locked it if there had been a lock on the door in the first place. He should get one now though. The world is dangerous.

Dumbly, he puts the raspberry container down on the corner of his bookshelf and sits on the edge of his bed. There are pictures of space on the walls. There are posters of the ocean and cards balanced on his window sill - birthdays, Christmases, Valentine’s Days and the like. 

He feels his duvet under his hands and grips at it like it’s a lifeline. He looks at the floor, where his carpet is dusty and sandy. Once upon a time, he had built forts out of all the couch cushions and every single other item that he could pull down from the linen closet. He would drag his lamp under the fortress and read comic books deep into the night. 

He gets lost in limbo - caught between memories of a happier time. 

“Shiro!” his grandmother calls from the other side of the door. “Your grandfather has something that he wants to show you.” 

For a second, he’s not sure that he can move. He’s stiff and tired and would probably curl up into the tiny twin-sized bed if he could. 

He stands, grabs the raspberries so that he can put them in the kitchen and leaves his childhood bedroom without looking back. 

His grandfather brings him outside to the back of the cottage, where Shiro spent his last summer on this side of the ocean to build a greenhouse. It’s still standing, though there are some chips out of some of the glass and other parts look cloudy. Even so, he can see the thick foliage from inside, leaves and flowers pressing against the glass like they’re caged animals - trying to escape.

“I kept all the plants alive,” his grandfather says, even though he’s never been a gardener. 

Shiro pops open the lock on the door and cautiously opens it, and he’s hit with everything that he left behind. He kind-of wants to cry and thinks that he’s going to because he remembers  _ planting  _ those tomato seeds, a million years ago. He remembers hauling in the dirt on the back of the pickup after a trip to town with Keith and he remembers pouring it all into the flower beds that he’d made from the timber of the cherry trees that came down in a storm. He’d cut the wood, sanded it, cut it and stained it.

“All I did really was water them,” his grandfather says, gesturing to a beat-up old metal watering can. “Hose water. At first I thought I’d take real good care of ‘em and mix some fertilizer and all that with tap water but your grandmother said that it wouldn’t matter ‘cause the plants wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.” 

Shiro doesn’t know what to say. It’s hard - to form words sometimes. “Thank you,” he says, and means it. He takes the watering can, as his grandfather goes back inside, and makes five trips from the side of the house where the hose is and back to the greenhouse to water all of his plants. 

He is taking care of something. He is taking care of something in order to keep it alive. The thought makes his hands want to shake, but he steadies them. 

And then he goes back inside, and sleeps. 

He spends the first week only leaving the house to go to the greenhouse. During the next week, he sits in the truck while his grandmother runs errands around town. 

He makes it down to the beach one day in something of a dream. It’s still dark, the morning too young to offer any sort of sunlight to see from. The beach isn’t even a five-minute walk from the cottage. The cottage itself is situated only a few yards above the shoreline and Shiro slinks down, stepping gingerly across barnacle-covered boulders. If he turned to the right and walked for a few minutes, he would reach a sandy grove decorated with a weeping willow and thick moss. The ocean there goes deep fast, and there’s a cliff face to one side that is ideal for diving. It’s an idyllic spot, the perfect little hideaway about halfway to the Koganes’ house.

He hasn’t asked about Keith. He could have, when he got back to the cottage. He knows that his grandparents have always kept tabs on the Koganes, as close family friends as they are. He could have known. It seems too long, now, to go back and ask. 

He walks down a stretch of rocks that expands into the ocean some way, and it even becomes an island when the tide rises fully. The tide is at its lowest point now, just coming back from it at that, judging by the way that the seaweed on the sides of the rocks is dry and papery.

At the end of the rocky outcropping, he sits and faces the endless expanse of water, in the direction that the sun will later sink back down in a glorious sunset. The wind pulls at the drifting waves and the whitecaps splash against the rocks, sending a light misty salty spray over Shiro and the rocks and the barnacles, and the entire sunrise, now that the sun’s rays have finally pulled their way up to the horizon behind him, clinging to the leaves of the trees and splashing golden light across Shiro’s back.

There is barking in the near distance - a series of large rocks a ways off shore. Every inch of it is covered with grey harbour seals. Frothy waves that crash against the rocks spray white mist all over them and they bark in joy, cutting through the icy morning. Summer is supposed to be coming soon, but the water that flows over Shiro’s feet is cold as ever. On his exhale mist billows around his face, and he’s wearing a thick sweater but even that doesn’t stop the worst of it. Once the sun is up it will heat the seaside up, turning the tide pools lukewarm and pelting down on the slabs of shale, making it hot to the touch. 

The waves lull him and the barking of the seals calms him in all of its familiarity. His shoulders relax and he closes his eyes, listening to the murmur of the ocean and the birds, high above. He feels the cool rocks beneath his touch and he curls his hand around its rough edges, breathing through his nose and out of his mouth. 

The salt on the air does not penetrate any of his blood-splattered memories. 

But they come to him anyway, clawing their way through his consciousness. His hand is damp, from crimson. The drone of the ocean is troops stomping forwards and the screams of the birds above echo those that he lost. 

“I am Shiro,” he says to himself, to the ocean and to God, if there’s one out there. “I am Takashi Shirogane.” He breathes, or tries to. “I am not Kuron. I am not part of Kerberos anymore.” 

The tattoo on his shoulder burns him and without thinking his hand lays on top of it, the snarling dog head with vicious teeth, the brand that he wears and the brand that everybody else on the Kerberos mission wore. It identified them in a way that they were supposed to avoid, but it struck fear into the hearts of the people who saw it. 

A voice screams and Shiro tries to help them all, but he’s falling. 

It takes too long to come back to himself. He sits there until the sun is fully up, fighting with his mind to try and make sense of what’s real and what’s not. He has a hand in his hair, another around his neck to feel the thud of a pulse that’s beating far too quickly. 

“Shiro! You out here?” There’s a shout from the cabin and Shiro shakes the residue from his shoulders, squares them, and stands.

He stands, only to find that he’s standing on an island. The tide has taken him, sweeping him away from the shore. He yells back, “Here!” But it’s hoarse and weak.

They must hear him anyway, because his grandfather calls, “Stuck on that island of yours again?” 

_ Again.  _

The last time, it had been with Keith and Allura and Romelle. They had hauled a picnic out there, brought a speaker and Shiro’s iPod, and they laughed until the sun had set and the tide had gone down so that they could return to steady land. It feels like so long ago, now. Both Allura and Romelle had made their way to college the next year, moving away from the small town and into the big city. 

“Yeah,” he says, and knows that it’s not loud enough to carry over the waves. It’s alright; his grandfather is coming down the stairs, looking out to the ocean. He sees Shiro and waves.

“I’ll grab the boat,” he calls, turning and walking over to the dock.

Shiro climbs into the boat, lets his hand fall over the edge and pull through the waves. 

The next morning, he goes out there again. He waits, this time, until the sun has risen, and the island has already been separated from the beach. He sits on a massive piece of driftwood caught between rocks and rests his elbow on his knee, but he’s caught off-balance, when he goes to rest his other arm and feels a flash of cold when he remembers that only bits and pieces of him had made it home from the war. 

The ocean pushes and pulls waves, a cover for the undertow, farther out. One doesn’t notice it until it’s too late, and they’ve already been dragged away from shore and then down into the depths. Shiro got caught in it once, when he was small. He was fine in the end. Keith’s father hauled him out of the water and onto the paddleboard that he’d been sitting on, and together they went back to shore where Shiro and Keith made sandcastles for the rest of the afternoon. 

There is a tide pool to his left. It’s deep, churning through the cracks in the rocks. There are hermit crabs there, scuttling around. Starfish have jammed themselves into crevices and there’s even a little sea anemone covered in barnacle shells. Shiro leans over, dunks his hand in the water, and watches as everything runs away from him into the rock. He chases one down, grabs a hermit crab’s shell and pulls it out of the cold water. It’s hidden deep in its shell, but after he holds his hand still for a few moments it uncurls itself and pulls its shell across Shiro’s palm, just like they had done when Shiro was a child. He plops it back into the water and runs a finger over one of the starfishes, its surface rough against his fingertips. 

_ Just like a kid again, like the war never happened.  _

“Hey!” 

And Shiro has been feeling something that was a scary approximation of equilibrium, but all of a sudden his blood runs ice cold, colder than the ocean, at the force of the yell from further down the beach. 

It’s not even just the force of it, the determination of it. 

It’s that he  _ knows _ that voice, knows it better than he knows his own. 

“Get back here!” Keith shouts, and Shiro jerks back so quickly that he almost falls off the log. “Leave that guy alone.” 

Shiro looks up, and he should have been able to tell what was happening before it was upon him but his reflexes have been so dulled since he got back and his hearing is stuck stagnant at a place quieter than it has ever been before. He’s not at his best. He can’t keep moving into occupied territories in this condition; he needs to think of a different option, he needs to strategize his team so that they can still-

Oh. 

He blinks, and remembers. 

A huge dog bounds up to him, tongue lolling out of his mouth. He pushes his cold nose into the back of Shiro’s hand and then licks him. Shiro chuckles, or tries to. Wants to. “Hey, buddy.” 

“Kosmo, come! Stop bothering people,” Keith shouts, and Shiro looks up,  _ really _ looks up, for the first time. 

Keith hasn’t changed. He looks like he always did: windswept, determined. Fierce. 

“I-” Keith is closer now, and he’s looking at Shiro as if he’s a ghost. He stops, five-some yards out, and the wind blows his hair into his eyes. He stands, poised, one arm extended ever so slightly and mouth turned into a little “o”. 

Shiro would say something but his throat is dry, suddenly. The dog - Kosmo - licks Shiro’s hand again. And Shiro automatically pats the top of his head. 

“I-” Keith tries again, frowns, takes a step forward and then another. “Shiro?”

Shiro looks at Keith and it’s as if there is nothing else left in the world - like everything has been still, stagnant, stuck in time until Keith’s arrival. Keith stands there and Shiro can barely remember the war, for the first several moments. 

Shiro nods, and he thinks that he should be standing now. He should be standing and moving towards Keith. He should apologize. 

_ I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. _

Shiro cannot stand. His legs aren’t working. Kosmo nudges his hand again and Shiro sees a flash of blood, a splash of crimson staining his skin in the wake of the wet. Blood from him, maybe. Blood from his troop, perhaps. Blood taken from beneath the skin of the enemy, probably. 

“They said you died,” Keith says, and his voice is smaller than it has ever been. Gingerly, he steps over the rocks, slips, and splashes into a tide pool but keeps on moving forwards, like nothing will be able to hold him back from reaching Shiro, not ever. Like Shiro is the middle of the galaxy and Keith is just returning to his orbit, aligning the entire universe. “You died,” he says, and stands before Shiro, so dangerously alive. “You’re here.” 

Shiro looks at Keith’s face, how delicate it is, weathered by the weather and years spent living in a small town, farming and making an honest living off of the land. It’s hard work. Keith’s hands are still calloused, have always been calloused like that, and will always be.

“I’m here,” Shiro says after a silence that stretches for too long, probably. 

Keith’s eyes don’t leave Shiro’s. They don’t flicker to the stump of where an arm used to be, or the vicious tattoo that has carved its way in his skin just above where the flesh comes to an end. His eyes don’t falter to Kosmo, who’s bounded away, barking at something - seagulls, probably.

“God,” Keith says, and then, “Nobody said anything.” His eyes still don’t falter, but his voice does. 

Shiro stands, pushing his hand against the driftwood and rubbing his palm onto his jeans after to get rid of the sandy dust left behind. 

The way that Keith says, “Fuck, Shiro,” and then, “C’mere...” has Shiro’s soul aching. 

He didn’t even think that he had one left, at this point - a soul, that is. It seemed like the sort of thing that would stay behind in the war, left between the bodies and lives that he’s ripped from the world. 

Keith’s arms are open wide and his embrace feels like coming home, like touching down on earth for the first time after being stuck in space for years upon years. Keith is still smaller than him, but not by much, and he hooks his chin over Shiro’s shoulder. 

Shiro wants to sob. There is something unraveling in his chest and his breaths come in harsh gasps as he presses his forehead to Keith’s shoulder, curling around him, grabbing a fistful of the back of his sweatshirt. Above them, birds scream. Somewhere behind Shiro, the sun has risen, casting the warmest golden hues across the beach. The light catches on the rocks, splays across Kosmos’s smooth brown and black coat, and dances around Shiro and Keith. 

Being held by Keith is like being bathed in starlight.

Keith holds him like he’s holding all of the parts of Shiro together - like he’s able to stop him from falling apart. Like he doesn’t blame Shiro for being killed. Like Shiro’s hands aren’t stained in the worst shades of deep scarlet. 

Keith rubs a hand up and down his back, pulling back enough to turn his face to the side and let his head rest against Shiro's collarbone. “You’re really back,” he says. “Shiro.” 

The sun feels so good, warming them, holding them upright. 

When they do break apart, Shiro rubs the back of his hand across his eyes and says, “Keith...” in the same tone that others may praise the existence of the All-Master.

“Yeah,” Keith breathes. “Shit.” 

They sit on the driftwood and Shiro alternates between looking at Keith and looking at the sea. Keith is silent, speaking lowly to Kosmo when he comes up with a stick for Keith to throw. Keith chucks it and it splashes into the ocean. 

“How long have you been back?” Keith asks. “Nobody’s… nobody’s said anything to me since…”

“Since I died?” Shiro finds his voice, stringing together some words, but they still rasp and run into each other. 

“Yeah.” 

“It’s been… two weeks, I think.” 

“Okay,” Keith says, and picks up a pebble, running it through his hands. “I- I’m so… You’re-” Keith stumbles through trying to start a complete thought, and ends up frowning and tossing the pebble into the tidepool. “I don’t know what to say.” 

“You don’t have to say anything,” Shiro says and tilts his good ear towards Keith. 

_ Please, don’t say anything,  _ Shiro thinks.  _ Don’t bring up the war any more than you already have. Please, please, please, don’t make me relive it all over again.  _

“It’s good to have you back,” Keith says, in the end. 

Shiro looks at him steadily, sees the flecks of blue in the purple of his eyes, and says, “It’s good to be back.” 

Keith is the one thing that has always, always stayed constant in Shiro’s life - at least before he shipped out. They grew up next to each other, all through school, where they’d study late into the night together and find something to laugh over even when everything was working against them. 

They don’t say much, that first morning on the beach. They sit together for a long while and Shiro breathes easier than he has in a long time. Keith talks, a bit, filling up some of the silence. “I took over Mom and Dad’s farm,” and, “I got sheep. And horses. Ten sheep, two horses. You always like horses,” and, “I named one of the chickens Eggbert Eggstein,” and, “I missed you, when you weren’t here.” 

It’s hard to pull out of Keith’s orbit but they part anyways, before the sun has reached its highest peak. Keith says that he needs to go feed the animals and Shiro’s head has been lost somewhere overseas for the past several minutes anyways, so he picks his way back home after promising to see Keith later.

He lies in his tiny twin bed, with the sheets drawn up to his chin, and hates the way that it feels like his head is sinking through his pillow - like he’s trying to sleep on a fucked-up, suffocating cloud. He drowns in it, flounders, and almost draws himself into a goddamn panic attack when the sheets get stuck around his ankles, before he pushes himself out of bed and curls up on his side on the wooden floor, away from the carpet, and curls his elbow under his head. He dreams of everything that he left behind. He sees the blood again, the hand, held in his own, detached. He sees dull glazed-over eyes and fragments of the whole, decorating minefields in shards of green army-issued uniforms and bloody tissue.

Shiro stumbles into the kitchen and grabs a beer from the fridge; he doesn’t even think about it when he pops it open and takes a swig from the bottle. He swallows and then takes another long drink. Shiro sits on the sofa, looks at the framed family pictures above the mantel and sips at the drink, staring into the frames holding him and his parents, some of his grandparents’ old dog - Sport - and the group of chickens that they used to keep, and all the wide smiles, giddy happiness captured and held still to relive. 

The pictures of himself make Shiro feel sick and, after his drink is done, he stands and takes all of the pictures of himself and shoves them into the drawer under the coffee table. 

If anybody sees him, they don’t make a comment. 

The next morning, Shiro goes back out to the beach. He didn’t sleep last night, and spent the very early hours of the morning walking through the cherry fields, seeing the treehouse that his father had made for himself once, an entire lifetime ago. It had been Shiro, Keith, Romelle and Allura’s clubhouse, at one point. Now, though, it’s coated in dust and cobwebs. 

The woods alone at night were not a good idea. 

Shiro may as well have just tried to go to sleep, because at this point he was seeing the same thing he would if he had been sleeping. In dawn so early that everything is shades of grey, shapes existing but not at the same time, it’s easy to confuse fallen logs with fallen soldiers and Shiro thinks he sees the outline of Hellhound, leaning up against a tree, and calls out to him, says that it’s Kuron, that he’s there to help, now. 

That he can save everybody, this time. 

That he has thought of a solution, a Plan E, a way to escape the past, a way to survive, this time.

He sits on the shore, tries to clear that goddamn lump from his chest, and lets the tide lap against his boots. He’s wearing new jeans that his grandmother bought for him, after he got back and they realised that none of his goddamn clothes fit anymore. The jeans are too new and too stiff. They rub against the scar tissue on his legs and rub red patches into newly grown skin. His tank top is soaked through with the ocean spray and his hair sticks to his face, the long white forelock curled against his eyes, plastered to the space just above his nose. 

When the water drips down from the bridge of his nose, it feels just like it did when Hellhound’s blade - held in the arms of the enemy - sliced through his skin like he was nothing, not a warrior; not even a soldier. 

Mist clings to the wave and raindrops fall in between sprays of water against the rocks. 

“Shiro?” Keith’s mop of dark hair bobs through his periphery and Shiro’s eyes snap to him, cling to him. “Not great weather for ocean watching, hey?” he says, stepping forwards. 

Keith settles beside Shiro, wearing a thick knitted sweater in autumn colours and a pair of cargo pants, muddy from the knee down. 

Shiro shrugs seconds too late, and looks back out when he hears a splash. 

Black fins slice through the water, streaming through the churning white-and-grey. The sound that they make is sharper than the dull push-and-pull of the waves and the orcas blow air out of their tired lungs, the sound reverberating around them, filling the air as the gull’s cries do. 

Some of the fins are in rough shape, chunks taken out of them, old scars and newer ones alike. 

The ocean is many things, but it is not forgiving. 

The ocean can take and take and take and there is nothing that anybody can do, no matter how much they try to gain a sense of power over the ocean. In raging forest fires, humans may tame the beast by drenching it in water, and humans can evacuate areas prone to flooding, or tornadoes, or volcanoes, but they always return. They always go back and rebuild, constantly reclaiming the land from the forces of nature who have ruled over the land for far, far longer than any human has. 

Humans cannot leave the ocean, they cannot run from it and return to rebuild. It is a place where it is impossible for humans to live and yet they still try to take it over, polluting it and splashing through it when it belongs to the creatures that live in it, amongst the waves, dancing and playing. 

The ocean takes - capsizing ships, pulling land-dwellers under and throwing out tsunamis. 

The ocean gives, too, if you’re kind enough to it. It gives to Shiro now, on the shore of the sea, and it gives to the orcas who have to fight for a dwindling supply of food. It gives to those who are longing, and haunted, and are looking for a way to reach something outside of the war raging on within their weary minds. 

“They’re beautiful,” Keith says and Shiro nods. It’s an understatement, but these days most things are. 

They watch as the whales pass, gliding through the water, fins rising and falling just as the tide does. 

They pass and Shiro breathes, trying to stay centered. 

“Have you kept up writing?” Keith asks, sometime later, when they’re walking side-by-side along the sandiest part of the beach. Kosmo is running farther up ahead, carving a way for them to go, leading them off on some sort of grand adventure. 

Too long ago, Shiro spent his free time writing, filling notebooks and word documents alike to the brim with his thoughts and stories of people stronger and braver. Keith would never know, but Shiro had written him into one of the stories, between dragons and knights.

Shiro says, “No,” and then feels bad about the abrupt end to the thought. He used to be able to carry on conversations with Keith for hours upon hours, their voices only quieting down after they’d grown raspy and exhausted. “I tried,” he says. “Looked over some of the old stuff. It didn’t really make sense to me now, though.” 

“You’re a great writer,” Keith says, nudging his shoulder against Shiro’s. 

“And you’re a great artist,” Shiro says instantly. “Have you kept up with that?” 

“Trying to,” Keith says and then laughs. “Yeah. Yeah, I get you. It’s hard to make sense of it anymore.”

“Still have art in that gallery?” 

“Nah. It’s in a cafe now, which is fine. It’s cool.” 

Shiro kind-of wants to tell Keith how much he misses watching him paint. Keith was a goddamn genius with it, blending together shades of sunset until it was streaming from the canvas, straight into Shiro’s soul. He has some of Keith’s art in his room, somewhere, he thinks. At least, it’s probably still there. By now it’s probably covered in sand and a layer of dust, but Shiro knows that the beauty would still be there, as daring as ever.

“That’s nice,” Shiro says, and bends down to throw a stick for Kosmo to chase after. “You should paint some more, sometime.” 

“I did start something,” Keith says. “Just after you got back. It’s a slow process though - I can’t seem to get it right.” 

“I’m sure you can do it,” Shiro says, and his voice sounds warm, like the sun on the rocks. “You’re really talented.” Another understatement. This day’s full of them.

Keith’s property isn’t grand or lavish to any extent but he keeps it clean and neat. They walk up sandy steps to the front yard, where planters hold the beginnings of vegetables, and Keith leads them around the back of the house, through the little grove of apple trees and to the barn. 

“That’s Dawn,” Keith says, pointing at a sandy-coloured horse. “And her friend Ruby.” There’s another horse, taller and red-colored, standing under a tree and looking at them, her ears flicked forwards. 

“When’d you get horses?” Shiro asks, and moves towards the fence, holding out a hand to Dawn, who ambles over slowly. 

“Last year,” Keith says, stepping in beside Shiro and clucking to the horse. “The Andersons were moving away ‘cause their daughter got pregnant and they wanted to be closeby to help with the grandbaby. Which is fair enough, but they had some horses, so.” 

Dawn pushes her nose into Shiro’s open palm and her lips open and brush against his skin. 

Keith chuckles. “She’s looking for treats.” He digs around in one of his pockets and comes out with some crumbles. “Here ya go.” 

Shiro takes them and holds them out flat like he was taught in summer camp so long ago. Dawn takes them gently from his hand. 

“She likes you,” Keith says. “You and those gross treats.” 

“You say that like you’ve tried them before.” 

“Yeah. I’m not even gonna deny that. To save you the trouble - they taste like salted dirt.”

Shiro wrinkles his nose and Dawn sticks her head forwards again like she’s looking for more. 

“Do they help you out around the farm?” Shiro asks. 

“They try. They just get in the way, though. Neither of them know how to pull anything, but the Andersons said that Ruby can do fancy jumping stuff, so I’ve convinced a couple of little girls from town to come out every once and a while to ride them.” 

Shiro nods. “That’s good. I’ve always liked horses.” 

“I know,” Keith says, and he smiles at Shiro, all warm and familiar. “Wanna come see the baby goats?”

Keith lives off of the land, as much as he can. He raises some sheep and ships them away once they’ve become big enough and has a small group of dairy cows along with a flock of hens. He has a field splattered with apple trees and another with cherries and he does all of the odd jobs around town, from fixing broken sinks to looking for people’s missing pets. In between tasks, he takes care of his vegetable garden and fishes on the ocean in his little boat. It’s not a lavish life, but it’s an honest one. 

It's strange, how everything slides into place... how everything slips back into the past, so wrapped up in nostalgia that sometimes Shiro forgets to taste the blood between his teeth. 


	3. III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shiro looks at his hands and they’re dripping with scarlet.

Shiro lands himself in some sort of routine. He wakes up and lies in bed for a while on a good day, staring at the ceiling and reminding himself of who he is. He goes through a catalog of his injuries, makes sure that he remembers that his arm is missing and that he’s carved with scars. He thinks about his troop, too, and tries to capture the idea of them when they were at their finest, hiking through the desert with jokes on their tongues and smiles on their faces. 

Then, he takes a shower and finds some comfortable clothes to wear. He ties his hair up and says good morning to his grandparents, who are normally sitting at the kitchen table and eating their breakfast - bacon and eggs, orange juice and coffee, plus toast when they’re feeling fancy. 

Shiro’s stomach still churns in the mornings but he drinks some water, sometimes, and goes to water his plant and sit in his greenhouse. 

He goes to the beach after that, and sometimes Keith is even there. 

After that, he goes back inside and finds something to eat, or grabs something from the greenhouse. If he’s feeling really good, he’ll bake something with his grandmother. 

“You’re feeling better, aren’t you?” she asks one day, apron tied around her waist and holding a tray of fresh cookies that Shiro helped her make. 

“I’m…” Shiro starts, but the ending deceives him. He’s gotten over it? He’s accepted it? He’s not hurting anymore? 

It’s hard to validate her - to tell her that she’s right, when he’s still hit in the gut every single morning and night and every minute of every hour with all the things that he’s done, all the blood that he’s spilled, all the lives that he’s completely destroyed.

There is a stump where the arm should be, and too many scars to count. He left people behind, but more than that - he left a part of himself behind, buried in the rubble between bodies and cascading screams. It was something pivotal, he knows. It was something important, a piece of his soul, maybe. It was the part of himself that differentiated between good and bad, and maybe he had been a good person before, but not anymore. 

“I’m here,” Shiro says, finally, after a silence that stretched on for far too long. “I’m here,” he repeats, and nods, like it’s something that he has to remind himself. 

He had been a fool to think that the worst was behind him. A damned fool, falling for something he had prayed for - the idea of finding a semblance of peace. He is the last person to deserve peace, though. 

Takashi Shirogane is not a good person. 

He used to be, once. 

He is not anymore. 

He brings blood and despair to the world.

He is a monster.

He is a fool, and wakes up screaming for the first time, four months after returning to the ocean. And eight months since returning from the war. 

There is someone screaming and it’s hurting his ears. The voice is close and in pain. It is terror manifested into an impossible sound and Kuron’s chest heaves as he fights for anything approximating a breath. Hands rake across his chest, ripping his T-shirt to shreds and digging into his flesh, pulling it apart at the seams- 

-There is someone screaming, and Kuron cannot breathe. 

In war though, that is not an option. He cannot drop, he cannot give him. He will not give in. 

He fights. His nails are short and his weapons are gone, but he fights all the same. 

Something is tangled around his legs and he thrashes, throws himself to the ground, shoves a chair under the door handle because the enemy is trying to get in - he can hear them, their voices, yelling for someone that he is not. They are angry, their voices shudder and the pitch grows higher with every passing moment. The chair holds them back sufficiently and Kuron looks for something that could pass as a weapon in case they get in. 

There’s a pair of scissors on the desk and he unassembles a pencil sharpener with deft fingers, unflinching when he nicks his finger and crimson pools out onto his palm. He shoves the blade into his sock, holds the scissors tight, and flings open the window. 

_ Need to get out, need to get out - need to GET OUT _

_ Out, out, out, out, out, now _

He climbs outside, feels the air on his face, and he’s in enemy occupied territory - he takes towards cover but his balance is off and now that the immediate threat is out of the way he looks down, tries to take inventory, and vomit gurgles into his mouth. 

His stomach heaves and he falls to his knees, emptying the contents into the ground. 

They took his arm. 

His arm. 

His-

When Shiro comes back to himself, there’s a dog licking his hand. Shiro blinks and can’t remember a thing except for his name for a second. It comes back to him in a rush, a moment later, and he grabs onto the dog’s collar, twists his hand through the dog’s fur - what’s his name, again? He knows this. He knows that he knows this. 

He turns the tag around, fumbles with it. _ Kosmo _ . 

Kosmo. Keith. Keith’s dog. Which means that- 

“Kosmo!” a voice calls, far away. “Shiro!” 

Shiro pushes out a whisper that he thinks might sound like Keith’s name and Kosmo licks his face, crawls on top of Shiro’s chest, and covers him in his weight. 

Kosmo barks, and keeps barking, and Shiro closes his eyes because his eyelids sting and his throat tastes god awful. 

His mind gets all fuzzy again, like he's standing on the brink of something, millimeters away from slipping off the edge. His body isn’t moving the way he wants it to; it’s dull and unresponsive. He tries to lift his hand to Keith but cannot. He tries to push himself to his feet but his limbs remain still. 

“Shiro,” Keith says, and Shiro can feel Kosmos’s weight moving off of him - can practically taste disdain in Keith's voice. “God, Shiro.” And there’s the pity. Pity and disdain. It’s what Shiro deserves, now. 

Keith brings Shiro back home. Or at least, Shiro thinks he does. One second he's outside with the smell of vomit thick in the air and the next he’s in his bed again, with sheets pulled up to his chin. 

After that, his mind goes somewhere else and he can’t for the life of him think about his grandparents or Keith or Kosmo. 

Instead of the salt of the ocean on the air, he smells the metallic tang of blood, and stands on the edge of a minefield. 

“Sure those maps are right?” Kuron asks. 

“Yep,” Blue says. “Checked them a billion times. I promise.” He sounds tired. They all do, now. The enemy hit them hard and their troop barely escaped. They all made it out, but there were too many close calls for any sort of comfort.

It’s hard for Shiro to think past the blinding pain in his arm from where a bullet has embedded itself. They need to stop to regroup soon, to try and get the bullet out and stitch up all their wounds. Hawk’s limping heavily and Night’s eyes went all fuzzy a while back, and when Kuron addresses him he barely responds. His head is still bleeding, dripping through the hasty bandage and thick mop of black hair. 

They have been hit hard. The enemy was relentless. 

There’s an outpost just through the field, though. It should have rations and medical supplies. It might even have weapons, if they’re lucky. 

There is no room for luck in this war, but still, it remains a force that they must constantly count on. 

“Let’s do this,” Kuron says and moves towards Night, grabbing his arm and pulling it around his own shoulder, even though he has to grit his teeth so hard that his temples hurt from all the pain. “You’re going to make it,” he says, and Hawk slips an arm around Night’s waist, helping hoist up some of the weight. 

“We’re all going to be fine,” Hawk says, but he can barely lay weight on one leg and his knee is twisted out at an angle so wrong that Kuron’s stomach lurches. 

“On three,” Shiro says, holding onto Night a bit tighter. 

“One,” he says, looking around his troop, watching for the worst of the injuries. If he needs to, he can leave Night with Hawk and go help someone else, even though his body hurts so badly. 

“Two,” he says, and looks forward. Blue is ahead of him and he’s holding a map - a map that’s splattered with blood in one section because Kuron slit someone’s throat and he was a bleeder, more so than usual, and it got everywhere. It’ll be impossible to get out of his uniform. 

“Three,” Kuron says, and steps forward. 

The whole troop makes it into the clearing and Blue’s standing at the head, one arm raised up so that they can see his signals and follow him properly, without setting off any sort of chain reaction. 

If things weren’t so dire, if they weren’t all on their last legs - almost literally - then Kuron might have tried to think of some way to get around the field. It’s dangerous, and a risk that he doesn’t want to take. He wouldn’t put his troop in this much danger if it could be avoided. 

On one side of the field, there is a river. It would take three days to go far enough up to be able to cross it. To the other side of the field, there are a series of large ditches and cliffs that they cannot see around. It’s the perfect spot for the enemy to set up camp.

It’s a risk he knows he must take: to cross the field. If he doesn’t get his troop to the camp they will all die. 

Kuron is leading them and so he gets a good ten paces out before he feels the air still, the birdsong cut out. The hair on his arms stands on end and the air feels thick. 

Like dogs, the troop’s hackles rise. 

_ Something is wrong. _

“Go back,” he says, scrapes out of his throat. Then he yells, “Go back!” and screams, shrieks, until he’s sure he can be heard in heaven and hell and everywhere in between. “ _ Go back, go back, go back! _ ” 

They’re turning, trying to get their feet under them, slipping and clinging to one another when they’re hit. 

They are hit. They are dead.

“Shiro, darling.” 

There’s someone in the room with him, someone carding their fingers through his long hair. It feels like how it used to when he was small and scared and hiding from the monsters in his closet. 

“You coming back to us?” the voice says, and Shiro opens his eyes. 

Shiro wishes it had gotten better, after those few days that he spent thrashing in bed, so far away from his body. He had been stuck in some sort of toxic mind space, where everything was going wrong all over again, played on a never-ending loop.

He gets back in his mind but still cannot stop himself from swirling down into panic nightly, and then every morning he wakes from his terror to find that he has a missing limb and scar tissue that has wrapped itself around his entire body, casing up all that horror and panic, keeping it within the confines of his skin. 

He can’t breathe, sometimes, when he wakes. He gasps like a fish on the beach, lungs aching until he chokes and coughs and wraps a hand around his neck, making sure that nobody’s holding his windpipe closed. 

Sometimes, he falls out of his bed and he loses the entire morning. 

Sometimes, he hears a loud noise when he’s trying to water his plants and loses a day, comes back to his body in a field a five-hour walk from his grandparents’ cottage.

After that, his grandparents stay with him. They follow him around, watching him like he’s prey, and he hates their pitying looks. He hates the way that his breath always catches in his throat and his jaws and teeth ache from clenching down on themselves for so long. 

Migraines bloom in his head and he doesn’t leave his bed. 

He tries reading to clear his thoughts but the letters get all muddled somewhere between the page and his eyes, and he listens to music instead but the pain in his head only intensifies from it. He sleeps. When he's not sleeping, bags grow heavy beneath his eyes, dark and tired. His pain runs deep and he stops going down to the beach. 

Keith stops by most days, climbs through Shiro’s window like he used to do when they were kids, and wraps Shiro up in his arms when Shiro can do nothing but stare, unfocused, at the opposite wall. 

A month passes before he’s able to breathe easy again. 

An entire goddamn month passes before some force drives the dark away. 

It’s like waking up for the first time in a millennia. 

He wakes up one day and thinks,  _ I should go water my plants. _ And then, he gets out of bed and does just that. 

His grandfather gapes at him for a moment and then his face splits into a wide grin. His grandmother makes him coffee and kisses his cheek when he accepts it. 

It’s not a quick fix. It comes and goes in waves just as the ocean that he loves ever so fondly does. Some days, he gets out to the beach. Others, he’s only able to walk through the orchard. Some days he still cannot get out of bed and spends his time sinking in and out of learned terror. But he does not lose himself completely again and nothing seems too daunting after you've been through that. 

Another month passes. 

“Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?” his grandmother says, sitting in the truck with her window rolled down. 

“I’m sure,” Shiro says. 

“Are you going to be okay? I left enough food in the fridge and some meals in the freezer, too, if we’re longer than we expect. The garden is also full of vegetables right now and if you run out Keith will-”

“Keith will have something,” Shiro cut her off. “I know. I’m going to be okay.” He smiles and is proud of himself in the way that it doesn’t feel like a lie. 

“I know,” she says. “I’m just… I just worry, you know.” 

“I love you,” Shiro says. “Both of you. Have fun.” He taps the side of the truck and gives them a small, two-fingered salute as they pull away. 

“We love you too!” she calls. “We’ll be back before you know it!” 

They leave and Shiro stands there for a moment, still. They’re off to the wedding of Shiro's second cousin. Shiro has never been close to the girl - Amelia - and a long car ride for three days filled with nosy relatives seemed like the best way to make him feel like complete shit. He thought about it for a while, mulled it over, even wrote out a pros and cons list, and in the end decided that it would be a horrible decision to go. 

Of course, staying behind isn’t all that great either - he’s alone. 

For the first time since before he shipped off, there’s nobody around him, nobody checking up on him every few minutes to make sure that his mind hasn’t gone completely off the rails. 

“Hey, Shiro!” 

Or maybe not. 

Shiro turns and smiles. “Keith.” 

They walk across the beach and Shiro grabs an apple off of a low-hanging tree branch to munch on. They poke around in tidepools and throw seaweed at each other like they did when they were kids and Shiro feels the farthest thing away from being alone.

The first day goes perfectly. Keith stays over for dinner and Shiro microwaves some mac n’ cheese for them and throws a loaf of garlic bread in the oven to be extra fancy. Keith brings over a bottle of red wine and they watch shitty reality TV after they’re done eating. Keith stays the night accidentally, having slipped into sleep somewhere between commercial breaks. Shiro doesn’t have the heart to wake him, so he mutes the TV and pulls a blanket up over Keith’s shoulders.

It’s the second day that gets him. 

He hasn’t checked the weather schedule, so he’s thrown off balance by a massive crash of thunder splitting through the sky as he’s washing the dishes from dinner. 

He hears it and it registers as gunfire so he goes for cover right away, sink still running and hands caked in soap. He dives to the ground, wedges himself under the tables, and pulls the chairs in close. He cannot feel his heart in his chest, pounding or otherwise. 

The floor shakes with the swell of bombs. It feels like someone’s trying to break down the door, feels like the thunder of an army’s footsteps across dry, bloodied ground. It feels like the ache in his soul, the screaming in his chest. 

It is the war. It has followed him across the sea and the entire goddamn country so that it can settle down around his shoulders again. 

A flash of light - gunfire - streaks across the window and a massive shuddering boom follows. It’s the sound of cities being destroyed. 

It’s the sound that signals Shiro’s troops to move forwards, walking across fields of bodies - looking upon those who couldn’t make it and staring steadfast into the distance, trying to search out some semblance of peace by ripping out the throats of the enemy, letting their hands drip with their lifeblood. 

The bombs go off again and Shiro should be getting his troop together, should be barking out orders and strapping munitions to his back, but all he can do it listen to the far-off screaming sound and feel his heart thud in tandem with the war waging around him.

Everything goes blank for him until someone tries to break their way into his brigade. He hears the pounding on the door, the hoarse scream in a language that he can’t quite seem to understand. Light ripples across the window and sears its way into his brain. 

He looks at his hands and they’re dripping with scarlet.

He looks around him and the chair legs thicken, turn into men's legs, equipped with heavy boots and thick pants of dark colours. One by one, they fall around him until he is curled up in the middle of an endless field of bodies, bodies that seem to thrash like the tide does around rocks just beneath the surface of the water. 

Why does he know what the water acts like when there are rocks beneath it? 

Wasn’t he born in this field, dusty and covered in blood with a mean, ugly look upon his face, blood streaming from a slash across the bridge of his nose and being called Kuron and gripping a trigger like it was the only thing he had ever truly held in his hands?

How does he know the ocean? 

The bodies swirl and the gaps between them fill with mud that sloshes around too freely, but lays in too thick to be water. 

It flows from his stump of an arm, covering the bodies in his own blood. 

The blood is tainted, evil and gritty. 

Kuron is tainted, evil and gritty. 

Shiro is tainted, evil and gritty. 

The banging on the door doesn’t stop and it sounds like the marching of the troops. Something splatters across a window - artillery spray. 

He’s suffocating in the bodies and he thrashes up, tries to get a breath over the blood clotting around him, but someone knocks him out with the butt of their gun on his head and he drops down deeper, black floods his mind, and when it clears he’s somewhere else. 

When it clears, he is in a forest, and someone is chasing him. 

He cannot run fast enough; he cannot scream. Something is chasing him and he’s alone. 

“Shiro!” 

Kuron jerks from the forest, slams his fist into the person’s windpipe, reaches with his right hand for his knife to finish the job easy as ever but- 

-But there is nothing there. 

“Keith,” he says, the name feeling strange on his tongue. It comes over him and he doesn’t know why that name fits the man under his hands. His eyes are scared but defiant. His hair runs wild. “...Keith,” he says, again, tries it out, sees how it fits. 

“Shiro,” the man says. “It’s me.” He tries to pull away but Kuron doesn’t let go. “Let me go, Shiro.” 

And then Shiro’s hit with a fucking tidal wave and he pulls back, flings himself back, scrambles as far away from Keith as he can. He can’t breathe, can’t talk all of a sudden, and the window has been flung open and his back is against a wall. Rain flies through the window and strikes Shiro’s skin, burning him though it is cold. 

_ I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. _

“It’s okay,” Keith says. “Hey, hey. It’s alright.” He edges forwards on his hands and knees, a giant red bruise forming around his neck.

He’s unarmed, and gunfire tears through the sky again. 

“Look at me, Shiro,” Keith says, and suddenly he’s right in front of Shiro, a hand on Shiro's shoulder. “Yeah, hey? Look at me.” 

Shiro’s head hurts like he’s fallen down a cliff, ripped apart by rocks and boulders along the way down. 

“It’s just a storm, alright?” 

Shiro can see Keith’s features, shadowed. “...Guns-” Shiro gasps, tries to warn Keith. “-Minefield. We- mines. Watch… watch out.” It comes out in gasps, his eyes so wide he’s almost seeing double. 

Keith looks scared all of a sudden and Shiro still can’t catch a breath, still can’t fight his way to the surface so that he can get Keith to safety. “Okay,” Keith says quietly, and shakes himself. “Okay. Let’s go hide, then. Is that alright?” 

_ Yes, that is all they can do. Hide and hope for the best, because Shiro is so unarmed that he may as well be naked. _

Shiro nods, and Keith squeezes his shoulder. “Follow me.” 

Thank god that Keith stays down, and out of sight of the windows at that, because Shiro’s not sure that he has the strength to lug Keith’s body weight around right now, not when Keith’s shoulders have broadened so much since childhood. 

They get to a bedroom with space posters but a quick glance around shows nothing in the way of weapons. The windows are sturdy though and they have heavy blackout curtains in front of them so that no enemy would be able to see it. Keith shoves the door closed once they’re both in and it slams shut. 

Shiro shivers, pushes himself into the corner out of view of the window and pulls Keith close so that he’s safe as well, wedging in between the bed and the wall. 

The bombs go off again and Shiro swears that he can hear screams. He must lose some time because the next thing he knows he’s covered in blankets that have been dragged down from the bed and into their little corner, and Keith has Shiro’s hand in his own and he’s saying something. 

Shiro can’t hear him. His ears thump with his heartbeat but he watches Keith’s lips move. 

He doesn’t sleep so much as pass out from exhaustion and adrenaline fallout. The next time his eyes open he’s curled up in a nest of blankets and pillows in Keith’s lap and one of Keith’s hands is tangled in his long hair. His head hurts and he doesn’t move for several very long seconds while he tries to grasp bits of his dream, tries to sort through what was reality last night and what his mind made up. 

He does this every day when he wakes up. 

But today he can’t tell what was a nightmare, what was a memory, and what was reality. It all blends together, meshing itself into something ugly. The war was on the ocean, or it wasn’t. Keith had been tangled up in the war just as Shiro had been, or he wasn’t. Shiro’s hands are stained with blood, or they aren’t. 

He keeps his eyes shut and tries to remember what the psychologists told him - to focus on breathing, to think of what he can hear, or what he can smell, if he can’t find it within himself to open his eyes. 

“Shiro?” 

The voice balances on the edge of his consciousness and it pulls him in like gravity. 

It’s Keith, because it’s always Keith. 

“How’re you feeling?” Keith asks, and the hand leaves his head, resting on his shoulder instead. 

Shiro groans and his headache intensifies and he can barely think of a single thing beyond the pain of it all, but he manages a groan. 

“Can you sit up?” Keith asks. 

Maybe he could. Maybe if he was brave - maybe if he was better. 

He opens his eyes instead, because Keith’s voice soothes around his body and it holds him close in safety. 

His back is pressed to Keith’s stomach and his head rests on a pillow shoved between the wall and Keith’s thigh. He’s curled into a ball around a mess of blankets and Keith has both his hands on Shiro - one on his side, where his ribs end in flesh, and the other on his shoulder, thumb moving backwards and forwards across the sweat-soaked fabric of Shiro’s T-shirt. 

Keith holds him, and Shiro looks at his hand, brings it up to his face, looks at the beds of his fingernails and then flips it around to stare at the lines of his palm. 

Last night, they were dripping with blood. Now, they’re frayed with healing scars, skin pink and pale. It’s clean. 

Keith holds him, and Shiro becomes blearily aware of another warm shape by his feet - a bundle of fur. Kosmo, deep asleep. 

Keith holds him, and Shiro lets his hand fall back to the ground, feels Keith’s hand return to his head, carding through his hair. 

Keith holds him, and Shiro learns how to breathe again. 

It’s much later when the blankets have been thrown back onto the bed in a heap and Shiro sits on the swinging chair on the deck, a mug of hot chocolate held in his hand. Keith stands before him, leaning against the railing, silhouetted against the ocean’s afternoon lull.

“D’you remember when we were kids,” Keith says, facing towards the ocean, “and we would-” Shiro can hear the smile in his voice, “-we would spend the whole day on the beach, playing in the tidepools?” 

“‘Course,” Shiro says, and his voice is raspy but it doesn’t hurt. “We made little farms out of shells and driftwood for crabs.” 

“With different enclosures for hermit crabs,” Keith says. “And- and ponds for treefrogs, in the woods.” 

“It feels like so long ago,” Shiro says, and sips at his hot chocolate. It warms his hands, and his chest from the inside. 

They talk of the past with a sort of fondness that’s impossible not to pick up on. When their mugs are empty, they put them in the kitchen and walk down to the beach, Keith a half step in front of Shiro.

He looks to Shiro and tosses a smile so carefree over his shoulder that Shiro's heart almost stops in the middle of a beat. Keith turns and his hair is windswept across his face, curling across his features in a tumble of black hues. He’s silhouetted against the sunset, arms held out wide. His smile looks like how freedom feels and he steps towards Shiro, bare feet sinking through the sand. 

He says, “Shiro...” and it sounds like a song. 

Shiro is tired, exhausted to his very core, his hand still jittery from the coursing fear that the night brought, but something about Keith against the sunset makes the tightness in his chest unravel, and despite himself, he finds his mouth curving up into a smile. 


	4. IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is painted in hues of grey and dark blues. 

Keith stands before the canvas and stares at it, eyes tracing across the fading charcoal greys, smoke dulling down the harsh lines.

What has he done? 

This has got to be a mistake. 

He started this piece on a whim - it was born out of a hasty sketch on a faded yellow page of his notebook ages ago, with frayed edges and rough features. He drew it for the same reasons that he draws everything: the emotions in his chest spill out onto the page from his heart, and he can do nothing to stop it. 

He hasn’t drawn for a while. It would have been a few years, Keith reckons. A few years since he drew properly, at least. He’s done the odd sketch, started a painting or two, even brought out his charcoal once or twice to try something out. He was busy though, and it always fell on the backburner. It was always something that he might do if he had time, if he felt like it. He never really felt like it. 

Until that one day, when he took Kosmo for a run down the beach. 

God, his hands had itched to draw, had longed to capture what he had seen into a work of art. 

Maybe it’s wrong of him to want to. Maybe it’s bad of him to draw suffering with such longing. Maybe he should have just left it where it had started - sitting on driftwood on the beach, like five years hadn’t passed. Like five years had been five days, or five hours, or five goddamn minutes. 

It had been impossible to stop, and the lines were so familiar. He’s drawn Shiro so many times, after all. 

But the Shiro that stares at him from the canvas is someone else completely. 

He’s never painted someone who looked so destroyed. He’s never been brave enough to entertain the idea of capturing an image of Shiro that isn’t perfectly carefree and happy. That’s how Shiro should be; that’s how he should always be: beautiful, with sunshine dancing through his eyes and a smile as captivating as the stars. 

That is not how the man on the canvas looks. 

The man on the canvas has vacant eyes and a far-away air to him. He’s a billion miles away, body tilted forwards, elbow resting on his knee, head bent down and to the side slightly with long hair cascading down shoulders and across ocean-sprayed cheeks. 

He is painted in hues of grey and dark blues. 

He is painted as he was - shards of someone who used to be there, who might still be there, underneath. 

Keith looks at the painting and thinks that it all has to be a mistake, that it’s all some sort of sick joke. 

On the canvas, waves crash around Shiro, frothy and  _ alive _ , drawing him in, pulling him towards the depths, and Shiro looks so tired, so beaten down and exhausted, staring with ghostly calmness towards the never-ending stormy sky. Keith can hear the waves, a dull push-and-pull, a splash against the rocks through his open window. 

He looks at his phone again, and sighs. 

It must’ve been one of the girls, he thinks. Only they’d be stupid enough to sneak through his house when he’s not there. They’re good kids, helping out around the little farm that he’s cultivated around his parents’ gravestones, but they must be a special kind of dumb to think that  _ this _ was a good idea. 

Dear Keith Kogane,

We are pleased to inform you that your application has been accepted-

Fuck, this has got to be a mistake. The painting’s not even done yet, it’s haphazardly done with paints that he got for his eighteenth birthday and never used up completely. 

He’s painted other things, probably better things - paintings that took months upon months of meticulous, detail-driven work until he deemed them complete. He’s worked harder and has produced better work, which means that this has to be a joke. How many years has he applied for this before? How many years has he carefully taken photos of his art and written out essays about it and submitted it all to the museum in a long, well thought-out email? 

The one of the girl and the sunflowers would have been nice. That one is light and happy. The paint bursts out from the canvas and brings smiles to the onlookers. It’s pretty. It’s refined. It’s hanging in his kitchen now, contrasted sharply with the eggshell-blue walls and peach curtains - all his mother’s decisions, from when she’d moved into the cottage with Keith’s dad and they’d been happy and excited to start new lives and new jobs and a  _ family _ . 

It’s a joke that the carefree nature of the sunflowers had been pushed aside and the painting of a man full of such unbelievable suffering was being brought forwards and celebrated. 

Keith stares at the canvas, smells the salt on the air and watches the waves around Shiro call him into the ocean, and thinks about how he’d do anything to drag Shiro back from that.

  
  


Shiro throws the stick for Kosmo as hard as he can and it flies through the air and hits the water with a massive splash. Kosmo lunges, leaping through the water in a flurry of high-pitched barks. 

“Good boy!” Shiro calls when Kosmo grabs the stick and turns to swim back to shore. 

It’s mundane. It’s everything that Shiro left behind, all wrapped up in a pretty pink bow. There is sand beneath his bare feet and his socks are tucked into his shoes on a rock farther up the beach. His jeans are rolled up at the bottom so that he can wade into the ocean and the sun shines just enough for him to be able to pull off his hoodie and let the sun’s rays reach his marred flesh. He wasn’t thinking, when he took his hoodie off - but then again, it’s not like Keith hasn’t seen the scars before. 

Shiro catches Keith looking at a particularly ugly scar that stretches across his bicep, but Keith doesn’t say anything. He just blushes and glances away, stepping further out into the ocean. 

It’s been a night since the storm ripped through the bay and Shiro can still feel the rumbles of the bombs shuddering through his veins. Keith promised him that it was only thunder, and the flashes nothing but lightning, replacing the piercing bright gunfire from before. In his mind, it had all been war. The differences between the sounds of war and the sounds of the storm lay in the details, so far away from Shiro’s fuzzy and static-filled, muddled brain. 

Keith stayed over the next night, too. He slept on the couch under Shiro’s softest blanket, having dozed off as he always does at reality TV shows. 

The sun is warm on his back and Shiro moves away from the ocean to sit down on the sand under the shade of a crabapple tree. He blinks and closes his eyes. He just needs to rest them for a second. The sound of Keith talking to Kosmo and the call of the gulls above, all overlain with the tide, lull his eyes closed and he dozes off without knowing it. 

Shiro is asleep, eyes closed and hair pooled around his head, so he misses the way that Keith turns around after having thrown the stick into the water for Kosmo and his eyes find Shiro. 

Shiro is asleep, so he misses the soft sigh that Keith lets out.

Shiro is asleep, so he misses Keith’s expression. He misses the way that Keith looks to him as if Shiro was the one to hang each star in the sky by hand and bring meaning to a life so full of war and hatred.

Some time later, Keith prods Shiro awake. Shiro hears it, feels Keith on the edge of his consciousness, and pulls himself towards the sound, drawing himself up and out of his dreamland. 

“Hey, sleepyhead.” 

Shiro smiles, blinking the sleep away from his eyes. “Keith?”

“Yeah,” Keith says. “It's me.” 

Shiro closes his eyes again and his grin grows with the warm, comfortable feeling in his chest. “Of course it is.”

“Sorry I didn’t wake you earlier,” Keith says softly, almost as if he’s afraid to break the careful, natural bubble of peace that they find themselves in. “You looked like you needed a good nap.”

“I did,” Shiro says, and then yawns, like his body is trying to prove it. 

“I just thought that you might be hungry,” Keith says, smiling softly down at Shiro. “I know you didn’t eat this morning and yesterday was rough. I have to go into town to do some errands, so you may as well come along with me. Get some food, and all that, y’know.”

“My grandparents left enough food in the freezer to feed an army,” Shiro frowns. “I don’t need to go shopping.” 

Keith’s face flushes red at that, and he looks away. “I- yeah. I know.” 

“Okay…” Shiro says slowly, sitting up in the sand.

“I just thought-” Keith waves his hands in the air, like that somehow helps Shiro understand him. “-that maybe you’d ah... Well, there’s this bakery. It, uh. It opened up recently?” 

“...Sure,” Shiro says. “Is it one of your errands?” 

Keith turns to him, wide-eyed, and blinks several times. “No.” He scrambles, then says, “It’s just that, y’know. I wanted to show you around.”

Shiro smiles and says, “Alright then,” because he really doesn’t want to have to say goodbye to Keith just yet.

The bakery is empty save for an elderly couple sitting in a corner. Keith says that he knows what’s best to order so Shiro sits down in one of the window seats and makes a paper airplane out of a napkin.

The food is good. The company is better. They make quick work of the food and chat between bites about how the town has changed since Shiro last saw it. Keith pays for both of them, despite Shiro’s objections, and they stop at the hardware store and the post office before heading home along the highway.

Wind catches on Shiro’s hair when he rolls the truck’s window open and the sun kisses his skin with a softness that had never been present back on the other side of the ocean. Shiro laughs when Keith turns up the music and his chest feels light and happy for the first time in a very, very long time. They blast ACDC as the truck speeds along the highway. 

“Livin’ easy, lovin’ free!” Keith shouts, turning up the volume even more until the only thing that exists in the world is the truck beneath them, the sky in front of them, and the music coursing through their bloodstreams. 

“Season’s ticket on a one way ride,” Shiro says, almost sings, smiling. “Askin’ nothin’, leave me be.” 

Keith laughs. “Takin’ everything in my stride!” He’s moving in his seat, shifting around in an approximation of a dance, awkward and fumbling and entirely, completely captivating. “Don’t need reason! Don’t need rhyme!” 

“Ain’t nothin’ that I’d rather do.” Shiro grins, looks out the window for a second. “Goin’ down, party time!” 

“My friends are gonna be there too!” Keith shouts, caught on the edge of a smile, caught up between such a blatant display of trust and happiness. 

“I’m on the highway to hell!” they yell in unison and Shiro flings his hair around in the wind, lets himself get caught up in the music and in Keith’s singing and the way that the car cuts through the highway like it’s the only goddamn thing that’s real in the entire world. 

There’s some take-out cinnamon buns sitting in the backseat and there’s a gold star sticker on the dashboard that Shiro remembers Keith sticking there back in fifth grade, when Shiro won a science contest at the school. The air freshener that hangs from the rearview mirror is the same one that has always been there - some sort of pine scent, too old now to smell of anything placebo. The truck is covered in dog hair and the floor is dusty and muddy on a good day. It was Keith’s father’s, passed down to Keith for his 16th birthday, who immediately crashed it into one of the cherry trees. Shiro was in the passenger seat at the time and he still remembers the flash of cold that swept over him and then the kick of adrenaline following. There’s still a decent sized dent and scratch in the paint at the point of impact to the front bumper. 

It’s familiar. 

The way that Keith is belting out the lyrics to every single ACDC song that comes on is beyond familiar. 

It’s there that Shiro’s hit with two sudden, undeniable truths. There’s no helping it, no denying it. He’s spent so many years running and hiding from everything and now he doesn’t have to run anymore. He can stay on the beach now - he can stay in Keith’s beat-up truck and listen to music until his damaged ears can hear nothing else. 

He is home. 

And more than that, scarier than that:

He is hopelessly, inarguably and completely in love. 

Keith is so beautiful. He has one hand on top of the steering wheel, the other sticking out the truck window like he’s trying to take flight. His body moves to the music, all soft and confident. His voice is rough but sure, not missing a single word. Shiro joins in, sings, belts out every single lyric and gets all caught up in the tide of Keith’s joy.

They speed down the highway and the minefield is left behind. 

Keith draws him back from the ocean’s tide, grabs loosely onto his wrist and tugs him back, pulling him down into the sand far enough up the beach and into the cove that the waves can’t reach them, and Shiro smiles, almost grins, and draws shapes in the sand with a stick. 

“Feels familiar, hey?” Shiro says, and smiles at the look Keith gives him from under locks of dark hair. 

“Like a fuckin’ time machine,” Keith says, but it’s not really like that because Shiro’s covered in scars on his body and some on his brain, too. He must be a bit taller now and he’s gained weight and muscle, though so much of it wasted away in the hospital in the months following his return. 

“Yeah,” Shiro says, and digs up a half-buried clam shell, tossing it to Keith who adds it to a small pile of shells and pebbles. “Next thing you know your parents will be yelling at us to come in and get dinner.” Shiro smiles, remembering all the late evenings spent running down the beaches, making forts out of twine and driftwood and castles in the sand, forts and ropes made of braided grass. 

Keith snorts and adds another rock to his collection. He sombers, suddenly. “S’been a while since they’ve been around.” 

Shiro got the short story from his grandfather, who seemed surprised at Shiro’s asking about Keith’s parents, and simply said that there was an accident and they didn’t make it. Keith was already an adult by that time and Shiro’s grandparents were in an empty house, whilst Shiro was across the ocean that he’s so fond of, so Keith had come over for meals and reassurance more days than not until he got his feet back under him and got things sorted out so that he could live on his own properly. 

“Is it insensitive for me to ask what happened?” he hears himself asking without thinking it through, and he looks to Keith, trying to gauge his reaction, trying to get a grasp on how he feels, but Keith has let his hair fall around his face and he’s fiddling with the pile of shells like it’s the most interesting thing in the world. 

“Nah,” Keith says, sounding offhand. “It’s fine. Nobody’s really asked though, y’know.” 

“It’s fine,” Shiro says. “If you don’t want to talk about it.” 

“I just assumed that your grandparents told you.” Keith shrugs and lifts his head and his face is clear, eyes red-rimmed like Shiro had feared, for a second there.

“Just said it was an accident,” he says. “I didn’t push it.” 

“It was a drunk driver,” Keith says, and shakes his head, grimacing. “They were driving home from dropping me off at work washing dishes at the bistro. It was quick. Painless.” 

“ _ Keith,”  _ Shiro says, and presses his shoulder to Keith’s, wanting to wrap him up in a blanket and hold him close until that awful, ugly look on Keith’s face disappears. “I’m so sorry.” 

“Me too.” 

“They didn’t deserve that.” 

“It happened anyway,” Keith says, and it’s quiet, the waves of the ocean feeling louder than they should, the gull’s cries piercing. “Just like you went to war. It happened. We can’t change that now… Besides, everything’s worked out pretty alright, now. Like - yeah, it’s shitty. It’s so, so shitty that I don’t have parents. It’s not like it’s-” He breaks off and leans into Shiro, breathes deep. “It’s not right. But it happened, so now I have to deal with it. I went to therapy for a bit, at the beginning, which helped.” 

_ I wish I could have been there with you. I wish I could have been there for you. _

“You’re the strongest person I know,” Shiro says instead, and adds another shell to the top of the pile, like it’s the right time for some dumb carefree activity like piling shells and rocks together. 

“I do my best,” Keith says awkwardly. 

Shiro finally does wrap his arm around Keith’s shoulders and pull him in tight for a brief second. He can’t help himself - can’t even stop himself from turning his head in and pressing his nose against Keith’s hair, feeling it tickle up against the scar spanning across the bridge of his nose. He pulls back when he feels like he might not ever be able to let go.

It’s later when Shiro says something about the war. 

He has his bare feet buried in the sand, wiggling his toes to feel the sand move. He’s laying on his back, knees up. He’s going to be finding sand in his hair for a long time but he can’t find it within himself to care; it’s comfortable. Keith is by his side and has built up a sandcastle of sorts around his collection of pebbles and shells. Kosmo is digging in some sand beside a pile of driftwood.

He knows he feels guilty, on some level, for not thinking about the war today in the way that he’s been caught up in it every single other day since he got back. Today has been full of  _ Keith, Keith, Keith,  _ and it’s somehow managed to drive the worst of the darkness away. 

“There weren’t any beaches,” Shiro says, starting quietly. “Over there. We were in the desert most of the time and there were some rivers, oasis and all that. But it was- it smelt so different.” The way that the dust mixed with the blood congealed and crystallised into his mind, etched into his scent glands. “It’s nice,” he says, and almost fumbles, for a second. “...to be back.”

“Yeah?” 

“Uh huh. Well, obviously for lots of reasons.” 

Keith snorts, but the look he’s giving Shiro is level and heavy. 

He digs his hand into the sand, feels it get damp, and almost gets caught up in thinking that it’s blood before he remembers that it’s just seawater. 

“I watched when-” He clears his throat, coughs, and changes his train of thought. “I’m not a good person, Keith,” he settles on. 

_ “Shiro.”  _

“No, I- I should say this. I need to say this to you, yeah? So that you know. You deserve to know.” Something steels itself in Shiro’s chest and he throws himself into it before he can stumble back and right himself somewhere in the ballpark of sand castles and nostalgia. “I killed people,” he says, and there it is - that lump in his throat, stuck. 

“I took lives. Murder,” he says, and it almost drags out a sob, but he catches himself at the last moment and rubs his hand over his stinging eyes. “And every single time I go to sleep I see their faces.”

He can’t look at Keith, can’t stand to see the disgust that’s flooding his gaze. He talks instead, barreling on, trying to make sense of it all, trying to tell Keith what he really means to say. 

“I see them and I see my troop and they all  _ died.  _ I might have been able to save them. I could have been able to save them, if I worked harder - if I was faster. They could have all come back here. They could have made it over the ocean but they didn’t. ‘Cause of me.” He breathes deep and when he touches his cheek, his fingertips come back wet. “I am not a good person.” He feels it in his core, deep down, unmovable. 

He feels the sand on his feet and the gentle lull of the ocean, the murmur of it between the rocks. It’s a familiar sound, one that he’s never going to tire of hearing, because it means that he’s home. 

_ Home. On the beach here, with Keith by his side, steadfast.  _

“I should have questioned the orders that I was given. I should have seen the bigger picture, seen that I was being used. It’s a mess-” He taps at the side of his head. “It’s a goddamn, fucking, shitty mess up here. Like scrambled eggs, right? It’s a disaster. I know I’m not good. I’ve done too many things.” 

Fuck, he wishes that he was able to keep it together, but he can feel the tears and his hand shakes when he tries to wipe them away, and his words are rough and pull at his throat. 

“It’s a mess. I’m a mess. I don’t know when it’ll get better, or if it’ll get better. During the storm I was back there, completely. I wasn’t here. You weren’t really there, either. It was just me and the bombs and too many bodies to count.” Maybe he’s going too far. He can’t bring himself to look at Keith - can’t bear the rejection that would be laying so open and full across his features. 

“But,” he says, and clears his throat again when it breaks. “But I think I’m getting better.” 

“You are,” Keith says, and it’s a quick thing, the words rushed but so full of conviction that Shiro can’t help but feel it in his bones. “You’re getting so much better, Shiro. It’s incredible -  _ you’re  _ incredible.” 

“I’m trying,” he says. “To be a good person, like I was before.”

When he looks at Keith a moment later he almost forgets how to breathe. He looks heartbroken, like someone ripped open his chest and pulled his still-beating heart out. He looks open, raw and exposed. There are tear tracks down his face, and he says, vehemently, “Takashi Shirogane, you are the greatest person that this shitty world has to offer. What happened to you was the absolute worst thing to happen to anybody. You aren’t just a collection of bad memories of a war that you didn’t know you were getting into.”

Shiro shakes his head, almost protesting, but Keith stops him, cuts in front. “What you did over there doesn’t reflect on who I know you to be. Shiro - I grew up by your side.  _ I know you _ .” 

“I’m trying,” Shiro says. “To get better, because I  _ wasn’t. _ ”

“I know,” Keith says, and he looks sad. 

“I promise I’ll be good again.” He doesn’t know who he’s saying it to - maybe himself, or maybe to the ghosts that surround him. Maybe he’s saying it to the memories of those who he left behind - Jason, caked in blood and mud. Or to Bruce, or Frank, or Jack, or Don, or all the others that didn’t get graves, didn’t get a funeral. 

He feels the sand beneath his feet and looks up towards the sky in the direction of a sun that’s finally begun its descent into the ocean’s depths. 

“I was called the champion, over there,” Shiro says, because suddenly he needs Keith to  _ know.  _ “Sometimes. Because I always won all the fights. Well, obviously not that last one-” He chuckles, trying to sound lighthearted but it falls short. “But the rest of them. I can’t really shake it. I was told I was the best that they had, but doesn’t that… doesn’t that mean I was the worst?” He turns pleading eyes to Keith, trying to find some softness there to soothe the edges of his own anxieties. “Do I- fuck,  _ Keith.  _ I’m trying to be better but do I even  _ deserve  _ that?” 

And that’s it, right there. That’s the root of it all, he thinks. 

The psychologists and doctors called it survivor's guilt, the feeling of coming back from a remarkable tragedy and not being able to understand that it’s  _ okay  _ that he made it out of there without anybody else. But he hurt so many people - destroyed so many families. 

“ _ Yes, _ ” Keith says, like there’s no other option that he could have picked. “I can’t even imagine how you feel, but it’s not going to bring anybody back, falling deeper.” 

_ It’s not going to bring anybody back.  _

He’s been falling for a long, long time. Ever since he got that first feel for blood, the praise that he was granted, the exhilarating feel of doing something right for his country, like his father did. He knows, now, that they call it dehumanization. He knows, now, that there was a certain amount of conditioning in the war, the way his commanders were able to make him do things that now make him want to rip his own eyes out. 

On some level, it wasn’t him. 

On some level, the blame lies with the commanders and the higher-ups and Kuron. 

But it was his body. 

“Shiro,” Keith says, and it’s gentle, the way that his hand lands on Shiro’s shoulder. “You mean so much to me. So much. Everything, really. You mean  _ everything  _ to me, and you have for such a long time. I’m always going to care for you.”

_ Always.  _

Always surpasses everything else; always is a steadfast notion, something that may not be revoked, that expands over time, encompasses everything forever, no matter what. 

Keith has drawn him away from the ocean’s undertow, dragged him back from vicious nightmares and shielded him from cracks of thunder that mirrored gunshots in the way that they shook the ground in sharp tones. Keith has drawn him back, lifted him up and stood there before him like he’s daring the entire world to try and hurt Shiro again. 

“I don’t deserve you,” Shiro says, and marvels at how he has Keith.  _ Always.  _

“You do,” Keith says. “You deserve everything.” 

Keith has turned towards him, legs curled up under him as he leans close into Shiro’s space, and has a hand on his shoulder, looking at him like he’s the only goddamn thing in the world - like the setting sun and the push and pull of the tide and the screams of the gulls above them have completely dissipated into the air. 

“ _ Keith, _ ” Shiro says, and he can feel something scarily close to redemption enter his veins, wrap around him, and hold him close like Keith does now, like Keith is pushing it into his bloodstream, forcing him to feel a sense of peace that he has been so sure he left somewhere far behind on a battlefield somewhere on the other side of the ocean. 

When he kisses Keith, it’s because he cannot imagine a world in which he doesn’t have Keith by his side. He closes the distance between them, holds himself up with his arm, and curls closer. He feels one of Keith’s hands on his jaw and the other fisted into the back of his shirt. 

It’s nothing more than a chaste press of chapped lips. 

Keith presses their foreheads together, gets a hand in the back of Shiro’s hair, and holds him close as if he’s the most precious thing in his life - like he’d die without him, right here on the beach. 

“Shiro,” Keith breathes, and kisses him again, harder this time, more confident, more sure. 

Shiro, for the longest time ever since he got back, has felt very little other than the deep, terrifying understanding that he is all alone, isolated from the world, uncared for. He has been alone, in every single sense of the word, and he would have been fine, he thinks, with fading away.

When he slept, everything was plagued, all ugly and gross.  _ He’d be back across the sea, sifting through bodies, or he’d be drowning in blood, or somebody would be chasing him, and his arm would be gone, and he’d be -  _

_ Falling; _

_ Falling; _

_ Falling. _

It’s different, now, held by Keith. It’s different because he feels like this is a pivotal moment, something’s shifting from before to now. From war to love. From being lost, to being found. 

He gets his mouth back on Keith’s and feels their hearts beat in tandem. 

It’s not the first time they’ve done this - as kids, in a fort made of couch cushions, the summer before heading off to highschool. They did it again after that, too - at a party a month before Shiro shipped out, drunk and clumsy and trying to hold onto something that was slipping away far too quickly. They chased after their youth like it was something sustainable and then it broke the next morning, with them waking up hungover and somber a month out from Shiro shipping off to a hell that he wouldn’t come back from for a long, long time. 

Keith kisses him back and when he pulls back Shiro can see tear tracks down his cheeks, but he’s smiling so brightly. 

“You good?” Shiro asks, his own smile painted across his face in bright hues. 

Keith nods, pressing a kiss to Shiro’s palm. “I’m great,” he says, and his voice is so warm. “I’m happy.” 

Shiro’s breath catches in his throat and he almost says,  _ with me?  _ But he stops himself and drinks in Keith’s happiness instead, letting it wash over him, surrounding him in it’s beauty. He feels something unravel in his chest completely and the tension bleeds out of him until he feels open, raw and exposed, shoulders relaxed and a smile coming easily. 

He holds Keith tight, dragging him down into the sand with him, and Keith lays with his head on Shiro’s chest, ear pressed over his heartbeat. 

“I’m happy, too,” he says, and it’s the farthest thing possible from a lie. 

Shiro sees the acceptance letter in Keith’s pile of recycling on his kitchen counter, and he doesn’t mean to be nosy but he doesn’t think about it, just picks up the letter and scans his eyes over it. 

Dear Keith Kogane,

We are pleased to inform you that your application has been accepted into the Newport Gallery of Fine Arts for the upcoming exhibition dedicated to showcasing the talents residing from coastal towns along our Oregon coast. Your submission may be found on the back of this letter and details regarding your application and organization of the event may be found below-

Shiro flips over the letter - it’s all just generic, anyway. There’s a page stapled to the back and he pulls the staple apart, flips over the page so that he can see the painting, and- 

And that’s him, isn’t it? 

That’s Shiro.

“Good morning,” Keith says, walking into the kitchen. “I’m gonna make coffee. Want any?” He doesn’t look at Shiro - doesn’t see that he’s holding the letter. 

“Hey, Keith,” Shiro says, and frowns, trying to make sense of it all. “What’s… what’s this all about?” 

Keith looks up. When he sees what Shiro is holding up, he puts the coffee pot down and his face goes pale. “I- I’m sorry, I can explain.” He rushes, moving forwards. 

“It’s okay,” Shiro says. “I’m just surprised, s’all.” 

“I didn’t actually submit it, one of the girls who rides the horses did. She didn’t know any better. She’s just nosy, but she’s a good kid.” 

“I’m sure she is.” 

“It was a total invasion of privacy,” Keith says, eyes wide. “I shouldn’t have painted you. I should have asked. I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to actually put it in the gallery.” 

“Can I see it?” Shiro asks. “The real painting?”

“Of course you can. It’s just in my art room right now.”

The grainy picture on the back of the letter doesn’t do justice to the painting. It’s large, at least three feet tall and two feet across. It shows a man sitting on the beach, perched on driftwood. The sea is a mass of frothy white and grey and the sky is deep and stormy, a sea of clouds spanning across the top of the canvas. It’s painted in dark colours - greys and blacks, dark blues and hues hanging in the distance in between. 

It’s Shiro when he first came back, staring at the ocean like he belongs on the other side of it, lines harsh and jagged as his mind was. 

He wipes at the wetness under his eyes with the frayed corner of his sleeve and looks at who he used to be, all alone in the middle of a storm that showed no signs of slowing down or stopping. 

“You should send it to the gallery,” Shiro says, after a silence that lasts far too long. “The world needs to see this.”

“You?” Keith asks dumbly. 

  
“No,” Shiro says, and smiles, stepping towards Keith and curling an arm around him, pressing his lips against Keith’s forehead. “ _ You. _ ”


	5. V

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So hold me close and don't let go;
> 
> Cause when I'm with you I feel at home”
> 
> -Meant to be by The Workday Release

Sometimes, blood still washes over his dreams, deep and sickening. Sometimes, he jumps out of bed and forgets where he is, forgets who he is, but he comes back to himself quicker every time that it happens. 

He’s still set off by certain things and storms never really become that much easier to deal with. He still sees strewn body parts and minefields sometimes and sometimes it’s hard to think about anything but that, it consumes him so completely. It’s not a streamline recovery. He goes backwards, and some days are worse than others, but he feels himself growing stronger. 

He sits on the shore now, with Keith. He moved into Keith’s little cottage down the beach from his grandparents’ place a few months previously, because he spent most of his time over there anyway. He still sees his grandparents everyday. He walks Kosmo over there with Keith to take care of his plants in the greenhouse and get some of his grandmother’s fresh baked goods - mostly muffins these days. 

They’re wrapped in sweaters and scarves now, and Keith holds Shiro’s hand through thick knitted gloves as they trudge down the beach, while Kosmo plays in the shallows. Their new puppy - a king shepherd great dane cross - bounds after Kosmo, trying to keep up but still reluctant to go into the deeper water. Keith laughs at the dogs and picks up a piece of driftwood, chucking it into the freezing waters. Kosmo launches himself after it, splashing the puppy in his wake. 

“Aw, poor Wolfie,” Shiro says. 

“He’ll get it one day,” Keith says, ducking down to pick up a twig-sized piece of wood and tossing it into the water to Wolfgang’s left. He jumps on it, dunks his whole head under water in an effort to get it, and then sneezes when he inhales the water. He crunches it in two and runs up to Keith, jumping on his legs and dropping the two pieces of stick at Keith’s feet. 

“He’s so proud.” Shiro laughs. 

“You’re a funny puppy, little one,” Keith says, and picks Wolfie up, peppering his face with kisses. 

When Shiro pouts, Keith grins and presses a kiss to the tip of Shiro’s nose, too. “That better?” 

“Perfect,” Shiro murmurs, and ducks down to give Keith a proper kiss. 

“You’re such a sap.”

“I don’t see you complaining.” 

The sun is rising. 

The sun is rising, basking them all in warm hues, and the sunlight catches on the tops of the waves, refracts the light into bright points of white against the frothy blue of the rest of the sea. The sea is calm, steady and soft.

The sun is rising, and Shiro feels whole.

Shiro wants nothing more than to gather this moment up in his chest and hold it forever and ever, keeping it close to him so that he can treasure it in all of its greatness, all of its perfection. 

“Hey… Shiro. I probably should have said this before, but I need you to know-” He pauses and smiles a bit, and Shiro stops, pulling Keith closer, staring at the beauty that he has before his eyes, 

“I’m so in love with you.”

Shiro is still for a moment. He can’t quite comprehend what he is hearing and then it hits him like a tsunami and he’s grinning ear to ear, and has his mouth on Keith’s a moment later. 

“I love you, too,” Shiro says, and kisses him again. “So, so much.” 

They hold each other there, silhouetted against the brilliance of a sunrise, and everything - absolutely everything - clicks into place.

* * *

_ “So hold me close and don't let go; _

_ Cause when I'm with you I feel at home” _

_ -Meant to be _ by The Workday Release

* * *

** _ [Wonderful art done by Bloomejasmine](https://twitter.com/keithbday) _ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are greatly appreciated. 
> 
> You can follow me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/Castellation_), for a plethora of dog and horse pictures.


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